Zoom has announced a definitive agreement to acquire the cloud contact centre Five9 in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $14.7 billion.
According to Zoom, combining Five9's Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution with Zoom's communications platform will transform how businesses connect with their customers. Zoom expects the acquisition to help enhance its presence with enterprise customers and accelerate its long-term growth opportunity by adding to the $24 billion contact centre market.
Five9 has 2,000 customers worldwide and facilitates billions of customer engagements annually. It's a scalable and secure cloud contact centre with a suite of applications allowing for the management and optimisation of customer interactions across many channels.
"We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more value to our customers," says Zoom CEO and founder, Eric S. Yuan.
"Zoom is built on a core belief that robust and reliable communications technology enables interactions that build greater empathy and trust, and we believe that holds particularly true for customer engagement.
"Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact centre. We believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers. We are thrilled to join forces with the Five9 team, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Zoom family," he says.
Five9 CEO, Rowan Trollope, says businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centres but still struggle to deliver seamless experiences for customers.
"It has always been Five9s mission to make it easy for businesses to fix that problem and engage with their customers in a more meaningful and efficient way," says Trollope.
"Joining forces with Zoom will provide Five9's business customers access to best-of-breed solutions, particularly Zoom Phone, that will enable them to realise more value and deliver real results for their business. Combined with Zoom's ease-of-use philosophy and broad communication portfolio, this will allow customers to engage via their preferred channel of choice.
The Zoom acquisition of Five9 is also adding to its Zoom Phone offering. Zoom Phone is a cloud phone system that is a digital alternative to legacy phone offerings, enabling organisations to connect and interact in new ways.
Zoom says the combination also offers both companies significant cross-selling opportunities to each other's respective customer bases. As a result of the acquisition, Zoom thinks it will play a more substantial role in driving the digital future and bringing companies and their customers closer.
Following the close of the transaction, Five9 will be an operating unit of Zoom. Rowan Trollope will become a President of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9, reporting to Eric Yuan. As part of the agreement, Five9 stockholders will receive 0.5533 shares of Class A common stock of Zoom Video Communications for each share of Five9. Based on the closing share price of Zoom Class A common stock as of July 16, 2021, this represents a per-share price for Five9 common stock of $200.28 and an implied transaction value of approximately $14.7 billion.
The Boards of Directors of Zoom and Five9 have approved the transaction. The Board of Directors of Five9 recommends that Five9 stockholders approve the transaction and adopt the merger agreement. The transaction is anticipated to close in the first half of the calendar year 2022, is subject to approval by Five9 stockholders, the receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
