Zoom’s planned $14.7B Five9 contact center acquisition is off

Less than three months after announcing plans to acquire cloud contact center Five9 for a hefty $14.7 billion, Zoom today confirmed that the deal is off.

Five9, a publicly-traded company, failed to attain enough shareholder support for the deal to proceed. However, it also follows growing scrutiny from U.S. authorities which were looking into Zoom’s ties with China — it has a major R&D hub there, while founder and CEO Eric Yuan is a China native, although he is a long-time U.S. resident and citizen. And last year, U.S House speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to Zoom as a “Chinese entity.”

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Zoom emerged as the default group video chat tool for millions of people globally through the pandemic, but it has also offered a cloud-based business phone system called Zoom Phone since 2019. At its annual Zoomtopia event last month, the company formally announced a cloud contact center product called Zoom Video Engagement Center, which it touted for launch in early 2022.

With a major player such as Five9 under its wing, Zoom was going all-in on the enterprise communication vertical to target the $11.5 billion cloud contact center market. Now that deal is dead in the water, the path forward in the contact center space might be a little trickier for Zoom, but Yuan insisted that the company is still committed to that trajectory, and will continue its existing partnerships with the likes of Five9, Genesys, Talkdesk, and Twilio.

“The contact center market remains a strategic priority for Zoom, and we are confident in our ability to capture its growth potential,” Yuan said in a press release. “We are building this new solution with the same scalability and trusted architecture that has made Zoom the platform of choice for businesses around the world.”