Zoom Guides Lower for Q2 as Webex Posts Best Ever Quarter

Zoom's Answer to That Gap Arrived Three Weeks Before This Earnings Report

Zoom appointed Carlos Quaderi as Head of APAC on 21 July, effective 1 August, and his mandate reads like a direct response to where the gap sits. Quaderi, a 30-year industry veteran with prior leadership roles at Workday, AWS and Microsoft, previously ran Zoom's Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan business. In the new role, reporting to Chief Sales and Growth Officer Graeme Geddes, he's responsible for enterprise and SMB growth, the CX business, and channel expansion, not meetings, not core calling.

Geddes framed the appointment around where Zoom sees the opening:

APAC is a critical growth region, and our continued investment reflects the opportunities we see across enterprise & SMB segments, CX business, and our partner ecosystem.

Putting a CX and SMB specialist in charge of an entire region says plainly what the Q1 numbers only implied: Zoom's growth case now runs through Customer Experience and enterprise expansion, not through meetings and calling. If Q2's results show APAC or CX contributing more than usual to the headline number, this appointment is why.

What 25 August Actually Tests

None of this changes what Zoom already told investors to expect: growth slower than Q1, and slower than what Cisco and RingCentral have just posted. What it does change is what that number will mean. A soft topline alongside AI Companion usage still climbing and CX still accelerating reads as a company mid-transition, its revenue mix catching up to where its product bets already are. A soft topline alongside stalling usage or a full-year guidance cut would read as something closer to the "awareness problem" Yuan admitted to, unresolved rather than in progress. Zoom raised that full-year guidance in May to $5.08 billion to $5.09 billion. Whether it survives 25 August unchanged is the clearest single signal of which version investors get.