In the turmoil caused by COVID-19, schools are struggling to find a way to keep education going online. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan is here to help. The videoconferencing software, Zoom, is “one of the most in-demand software tools for the work-from-home economy,” according to forbes.com. With the closures of schools across the world and an increasing pressure for employers to allow employees to stay home, a work-from-home solution is desperately needed. And although Zoom does have a free “personal meeting” plan, Eric Yuan knows its 40-minute time limit won’t get the job done. Eric Yuan had already removed the time limit from provinces in China—the country of his birth—under siege from COVID-19. (1)

School Solutions

But Yuan’s generosity didn’t end there. With the help of a simple online form, now schools in China, Italy, and America will have unlimited meeting minutes, as long as their students are in the kindergarten to twelfth-grade range. Additionally, schools in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and South Korea can also request this same benefit if their classes are disrupted. Zoom even has a blog post that shows the best way for educators to use Zoom for teaching, which outlines the new, free additions to the basic plan, making this transitional process as easy as possible. (1, 2, 3)

Zoom and Coronavirus

Zoom makes business necessities available remotely, with such features as schedulers, videoconferencing, cloud support, and webinars all available. Although Yuan did not create Zoom with a global pandemic in mind, it seems like the answer to quarantines and social distancing people need. Yuan agrees. “I feel like overnight, this is one of the catalysts wherein every country, everybody’s realized they needed to have a tool like Zoom to connect their people,” he says. The research backs him up, as well: App analytics company, Apptopia, released data showing that the daily downloads of Zoom have almost quadrupled from amounts two months ago (343,000 as compared to 90,000). The United States is responsible for only about 17% of those downloads. These numbers come from as recently as March 11, 2020.  ( 1, 2)

The Finances of Fear?

In the last half-hour of March 13th, Zoom tweeted they were now #1 in Apple’s app store. Additionally, since February 17th, Zoom’s stock is outpacing Microsoft’s for the first time since October 11th, 2019. Despite this increased demand for his product, Yuan is insistent that his company not use COVID-19 as a marketing opportunity. “Let’s not leverage the opportunity for marketing or sales,” was his message to his team. “Let’s focus on our customers. If you leverage this opportunity for money, I think that’s a horrible culture.” (1, 4)

Yuan’s decisions back up his statements. Since schools will really only need unlimited video conference minutes while closed, they are unlikely to become paying customers. If Zoom was driven by profit abut humanitarianism, this would be the time to charge.  An analyst at the renowned JPMorgan’s Equity Research division agrees: “They are not looking to take unfair advantage. They are looking to help.” (1)