A painful recession may hit global economy soon, says Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu

There are chances of a painful recession hitting the global economy in the near future, and many major economies of the world such as Japan, China and the UK among others, are struggling, Sridhar Vembu the CEO of the Chennai-headquartered Zoho Corporation said.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Zoholics India, the annual user conference in New Delhi, he said it needs to be seen how things will shape up for the global economy in the times to come. He said despite the slowdown and tough economic conditions, their company had done well and managed to reach a revenue of $1 billion, and is one of the first technology product companies to do so in India.

“We had witnessed a slowdown in our growth this year (2022) over 2021. However, India is one of our fastest-growing markets in the world, and our annual revenue increased in India by 77 per cent in 2021. We have a R&D led growth and spend three times of our marketing spend on R&D. We received 25 patents in the last three years due to our focus on R&D,” said Vembu.

He pointed out that technologists should practice more humility. “After all, we cannot code more food nor compile new energy. Unfortunately, recent developments in our industry amidst the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating global economic outlook, are a rude reminder of our own limits as technologists. Fundamentals matter now more than ever, and our industry has to learn to lower the friction of technology so that technology becomes far more affordable.”

Vembu observed that the global economy is now like an earthquake zone, and however sound one's building is, one cannot escape the tremors of that earthquake. He said as a company, they are observing their month-on-month and quarter-on-quarter performance and had slowed down new hiring. He said they intend to maintain their existing workforce without a single cut. “In the present situation attrition levels have come down,”.

On the issue of moonlighting, Vembu said one cannot come up with any precise rules around moonlighting.

Zoho Corp also announced that it has plans to open 100 network PoPs (point of presence) around the world in the next five years for providing users with a faster network, and also double the investment for technologies such as blockchain and AI (artificial intelligence). The company is also seeing uptake of its products across different categories, such as Zoho One (the operating system for business), CRM Plus (customer experience platform), Zoho Workplace (enterprise collaboration platform), and the finance suite led by Zoho Books (GST-compliant accounting software).

The company has more than 55 plus apps in different business categories and more than 80 million users around the world, across thousands of companies. For faster processing of data, Zoho is focusing its AI development around statistical machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). The technology developed by its R&D team is utilised by products for different use cases.

For instance receipt digitisation in Zoho Expense (expense management tool) utilises optical character recognition (OCR) technology while Zoho Analytics utilises mathematical techniques for analysing data and Zia (Zoho Intelligent Assistant) utilises NLP for conversational AI. Zoho's AI technology translates into optimised processes.