Zoho to double down R&D but keep tech hiring ‘slow’

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Zoho to double down R&D but keep tech hiring ‘slow’
Sridhar Vembu
  • Sridhar Vembu of Zoho said that no other company has built a billion dollar product company in India.
  • Zoho’s annual revenue in India increased by 77% in 2021 but contributed only 10% to the overall revenue figures.
  • The company also plans to open 100 network PoPs (point of presence) around the world in the next five years.
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Chennai-based tech company Zoho Corp said that its annual revenues surpassed $1 billion in 2021, on Tuesday.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO and co-founder, Zoho Corp claimed at a press conference that no other company has built a billion dollar product company in India.

"While growth has slowed down quite a bit in 2022 over 2021, our diversified product portfolio and the fact that we save money for customers has helped us so far. We hope to continue to serve our customers by bringing the highest quality offerings at very affordable prices," said Vembu, who c-ofounded the unlisted company.

Vembu said that India has led the growth in revenues. In 2021, its annual revenue in India has increased by 77% in 2021 but still contributes only to 10% of its overall revenues.

Like in the case of most tech companies, the US and EU markets have contributed 42% and 30% to its latest revenue figures, respectively.

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“At the current pace, India could be our second market in four years and our top market in the next ten years, '' Vembu said.

Going ahead, the company plans to open 100 network PoPs (points of presence) around the world in the next five years which will provide a faster network to users. It currently has over 150 monitoring PoPs that help users to monitor the functioning of their websites.

It will also double down its investment in technologies such as blockchain and AI.

Zoho says that its R&D spendings are three times more than its marketing spends. “R&D is the biggest spending at Zoho,” Vembu said in a media briefing on November 8.

The company will be focusing more on data, database and data center, as part of the R&D capabilities. “For better processing of data, Zoho is focusing its AI development around statistical machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP),” the company said.

Hiring to remain slow at Zoho


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The company plans to invest more in R&D but intends to keep the hiring of tech talent slow keeping the ongoing economic slowdown in mind. But it will continue to hire in other departments like sales.

“We haven’t frozen our hiring in any department and won’t stop in certain departments but we will take it at a slower pace as we will invest more,” Praval Singh, VP – marketing and customer at Zoho Corp, told Business Insider India.

IT majors in India have cut down in hiring by at least 57% in the second quarter. Wipro reported the maximum cut of 95%, followed by TCS at 58%. This is in spite of the fact that attrition in the IT industry is high.

Whereas, Zoho’s attrition rate was at 8.5% in May. “Our attrition rate has always been in single digits,” Singh added.
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