Dhe plans of Zoom to establish itself more quickly in the call center business with a billion-dollar acquisition have failed. The shareholders of the company Five9, which Zoom wanted to swallow, rejected the deal, as the company announced on Friday night. Therefore the purchase agreement was terminated.
Zoom had announced the acquisition of Five9 in July and wanted to use its shares, which had risen in the pandemic, as currency to pay the then announced purchase price of $ 14.7 billion. However, the price of the Zoom papers has since fallen by more than a quarter – from around 362 to a good 261.50 dollars most recently. This made the deal less lucrative for the shareholders of Five9, even if their company lost around a tenth of its value during the period on the stock exchange. Zoom and Five9 each had the option to terminate the merger agreement if the shareholders would not agree to a merger. Both parties signed the contract on July 16, 2021.
To make matters worse in the past few weeks, the US government announced an intensive examination of the takeover. A special committee headed by the Justice Department investigated whether the deal posed risks to US national security.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan in 2019 when his company went public in New York
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Image: dpa
Five9 is a specialist in call centers operated in the cloud. With the purchase, Zoom could have expanded its business beyond video conferencing. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan assured in a blog post that the setback would not affect Zoom’s plans to expand the business, as Five9 was not critical to the platform’s success.
Five9 boss Rowan Trollope announced that he would soon present plans for the further strategy as an independent company. Five9 offers software that uses artificial intelligence to help companies answer customer inquiries.
Zoom had moved into a new league with the Corona crisis. The company was originally supposed to provide video conferencing for companies. In the pandemic, however, it was not only used in companies: private individuals also use Zoom for all sorts of occasions – from family reunions to yoga classes.
After leaps in sales of more than 300 percent last year, growth has normalized. Zoom therefore tries to use the tailwind to expand its business. The plan is, among other things, to take over the supply of telephony in companies in addition to video conferences.
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