Here's Why Zoom Stock Is Worth a Look Now

Zoom Video Communications (ZM -0.82%) has been one of the best-performing stocks of the past year or so, but has pulled back a bit recently. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on April 1, 2021, Fool.com contributor Brian Withers makes his case for why Zoom is still an excellent long-term opportunity.

Brian Withers: Last April 6, I wrote an article that I went back to and I thought it really resonated today. It was called "11 Reasons to Buy Zoom and Never Sell." I just posted that in the chat, the link to the article.

I'm not going to go through every one of the 11 reasons, but they're all still true. I know it's down a good bit. From my article, it's up 166%, and it's up about over 400% since it's gone public. But investors are a little gun-shy on this one, I think. It sports a 38 price-to-sales ratio, so it's still got a lofty valuation. All of the growth that it's had, it's actually slowing coming into 2021 and everybody is wondering what's going to happen when the pandemic is over and people are going to go back to the offices and all that stuff.

Well, I'm going to give you three reasons, in addition to the 11 that I gave you already, of why Zoom is still a great place for your money. Number one, video conferencing is here to stay, I'd say especially Zoom meetings. Interestingly enough, in October, CFO Kelly Steckelberg was at the Zoomtopia in Analyst Day conference. She opened the meeting with a quote from Marc Benioff, and I'm going to read it to you because it's really interesting. Marc Benioff, who's the Salesforce (CRM -0.57%) CEO, said this late September last year. He said, "We're in a new digital world, in an all-digital world. The past is gone. It's not coming back. We need to rebuild our companies, our organizations, and ultimately, we need to rebuild ourselves to be successful in this new digital future." Then here's the money part. "Zoom is not the future. Zoom is the present. This is our present reality."

You can't get a better pitch from a fellow CEO who's got no skin in the game to quote that. I think that's pretty awesome. Then Steckelberg went on to say, "While many of offices will reopen post-pandemic, we're never going to go back to the way we were before." They surveyed Zoom employees and 4% said they wanted to go back to the office full-time. Four. I think there's going to be a huge shift into this hybrid work environment. Steckelberg continued with a recent analyst report from a leading bank, estimates that the number of full workdays performed at home will triple in the post-pandemic economy.

Flexibility will become the hallmark of being an employer of choice. Even if just some of your employees are not in the office, you're going to have to have some kind of solution to ensure that everyone is engaged to be a part of the solution, and Zoom has got a tremendous set of assets to help make that happen. Reason number two, Zoom's leadership is top-notch. I don't know if anybody remembers, but last March and April, Zoom was getting chastised on the late night shows for Zoom-bombing and privacy issues and whatnot. Eric Yuan stepped up, the CEO stepped up, specifically put everything on hold and focused on security and privacy issues, and gave weekly updates, and then performed a 90-day retroactive. Here's what we've done kind of thing. I have never seen a company react so quickly and so positively to ensure the customer experience was second to none. All of this while the growth is scaling, just rocket ships up.

Reason number two, plenty of growth levers left. Zoom Phone. Everybody asked, why do you need a Zoom phone? Well, you know what? They're already at 10,000 customers. It's a $23 billion addressable market by 2024. Maybe in five or 10 years, we won't need phones in a physical office. But for right now, Zoom's providing it and it's a great part of their ecosystem. Second growth lever, Zoom Rooms. You buy a Zoom Room kit, it's a piece of commodity, hardware, a screen, a handheld screen to run the show. Then you hook it into the network. Then all of a sudden, you have your team room, your conference room, whatever, is set up to be a Zoom Room.

So many of these things in the past were huge monolithic, really expensive proprietary setup. They really stunk. I'm really excited about Zoom Rooms, just this quick and easy setup. This will become critical part of the hybrid workforce that we're talking about as companies come back into the office. They really haven't invested in the office at all. In fact, they're probably just cleaning once a month and making sure the heat stays on. When people come back into the office, having these Zoom Rooms, I think is going to be critical.

Last growth lever, international. It's only 33% at the top-line and growing way faster than domestic market. This company has got a long runway of growth ahead, they're led by great leadership, and we're not going back to the old way. Bottom line, 38% price-to-sales ratio is a little pricey, but it's not out of bounds that the company projected to grow 42%. Everybody just wanted a 42% growth next year. That's just amazing. Their price to sales ratio is actually lower than Cloudflare (NET -3.01%), Shopify (SHOP 0.23%), Zscaler (ZS -2.17%), just to name a few, with the stock off more than 40% of the time. Now might be a good time to take the bite.