soaring The video communications company said on Friday it was “doubling down” on technology investments in the Asia-Pacific region as it seeks to bolster growth.
Abe Smith, Zoom’s head of international business, told Squawk Box Asia, “There’s a lot of activity going on in Asia and across the Asia-Pacific region. We made a strong commitment about two years ago to really pick up the pace and ramp up.” “
“Whether it’s in Singapore, we have a full data center… (or) in India, we have R&D centers in Chennai and Bangalore.”
That’s despite the fact that the company has faced headwinds in the post-COVID world as more people return to offices and business travel resumes.
Shares of Zoom have fallen about 45% in the last year.
Smith said, however, that Zoom is “extremely optimistic” about the growth of its mobile offerings in the Asia-Pacific region.
He added that Zoom’s cloud-based telephony solution, which provides services such as unlimited domestic calls, text messages and call recording, currently accounts for 10% of its revenue.
“The product grew more than 100 percent year-over-year and today has more than 5.5 million seats,” Smith said.
“We will provide limitless human connection through myriad products … enabling people to connect and communicate flexibly and by choice.”
Zoom’s AI push
The company also recently announced Extensions for Zoom IQan artificial intelligence feature that summarizes chat threads and whiteboard sessions.
“AI is who we are…the intelligence in the platform has been there since day one,” Smith added.
“If you’re experiencing a Zoom meeting and using something as simple as a virtual background, you’re experiencing artificial intelligence. If you’re in a meeting and you want to suppress that barking dog, (using) background noise suppression, that’s artificial intelligence. ”
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