After the US and European Union (including the UK), which accounts for around 45 per cent and 25 per cent market shares respectively for Zoho – one of the few global success stories in the software-as-a-service space emanating from India, India is now its third largest market contributing 10 per cent of its overall revenue, cofounder and CEO Sridhar Vembu told Financial Express Online.
“The US market share has, in fact, decreased as we are growing fast in Europe, Latin America, China and India. The integrated product suite sells better outside the US now. While the cloud’s home is the US but companies there have the marketing power to tell customers about individual products. However, this doesn’t work in other parts of the world. Our integrated office suite Zoho One sells much better in other countries,” said Vembu.
Zoho One comprises of 46 software applications across every major business category including email, customer support, marketing, sales, back-office operations, accounting, finance, HR etc. It recently announced the addition of its e-commerce solution — Zoho Commerce for businesses to set-up GST compliant online stores, manage inventory and order, provides product recommendations based on customers’ purchasing pattern etc.
Zoho currently has more than 350,000 paid customers globally along with a headcount of 7,000 that is likely to hit 10,000-mark in around two years, said Vembu.
While the company has always refrained from disclosing their revenues but $310 million was its estimated revenue for FY17, Forbes reported.
Interestingly, Zoho, launched in 1996, remains bootstrapped till now and has been profitable even as Vembu has no plans of taking the company public at “least till he is alive.”
“We don’t want to IPO. We don’t need that capital. It affects our freedom. People start business saying that they want the freedom to run the business but they later surrender it to stock exchanges. I don’t see an appeal in that idea,” Vembu added.
Zoho email service — Zoho Mail, which has remained its fastest growing application, competes directly with Gmail.
