Earlier last month, Unified Communication-as-a-Service (UCaaS) leader RingCentral (NYSE: RNG) announced its first-quarter results that continued to surpass market expectations. RingCentral has been building its market presence through continued partnerships with key go-to-market players. The move has helped it secure its leadership position in the North American market.
 

RingCentral’s Financials

RingCentral’s first-quarter revenues grew 33% to $467.66 million, significantly ahead of the market’s forecast of $458.36 million. Non-GAAP net income per diluted share was $0.39, ahead of the Street’s estimates of $0.34.

By segment, software subscription revenue increased 35% to $440 million. Other revenues grew 2.2% to $27.7 million.

For the second quarter, RingCentral expects revenues of $475.5-$479.5 million. It expects subscription revenues of $449-$452 million. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.40-$0.41. For the full year, it expects revenues of $1.990-$2.015 billion, with a non-GAAP EPS of $1.83 to $1.87.
 

RingCentral’s Growing Partnerships

Recently, RingCentral announced its partnership with Frontier which launched an all-in-one productivity package, enabling small businesses to run seamlessly from anywhere. The solution combines cloud communications solutions with high-speed internet and network solutions. The partnership allows both companies to deliver unified cloud communications and meet customers’ rapidly growing bandwidth needs. By combining RingCentral’s leading UCaaS platform with Frontier’s lightning-fast symmetrical fiber service, the companies are able to create a reliable solution that provides a seamless HD video conferencing and cloud calling experience. RingCentral has been building its partnership portfolio and had already announced similar engagements with AT&T, Avaya, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Mitel, Verizon, Vodafone, and many others.

During the quarter, RingCentral continued to release new capabilities. It introduced RingCentral Webinar Beta, a simple, seamlessly integrated webinar product. It is also leveraging AI into its platform and released AI-based meetings, insights, and summaries, a new feature that helps people catch up on meetings with short-term summaries, video highlights, and hyperlinked keywords.

The company sees four key trends driving the industry. First, even with the easing of pandemic restrictions, hybrid work will remain here to stay, thus reinforcing the need for cloud-based communications platforms. Second, it believes in the ongoing adoption of mobility by businesses worldwide that will result in the need for solutions that enable work in any mode, on any device, from anywhere. Third, the growth of Microsoft Teams in the enterprise will create a meaningful opportunity for well-integrated enterprise-grade UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, and fourth the continued preference from CIOs will help evolve cloud-based unified communications and contact centers as an integrated solution from a single provider. RingCentral believes that it is quite capable of handling these growing trends.

RingCentral’s continued product innovation and partnership line-up have helped it maintain its lead in the UCaaS market. According to a recent Frost and Sullivan report, RingCentral has maintained a leadership position in the North American UCaaS market since 2013 and is gradually expanding its presence in other world regions. The pictograph below shows how busy the UCaaS market is in the US. But analysts believe that RingCentral’s competitively packaged and priced SMS and analytics tools, video and web conferencing, webinar and integrated contact center services, and a collaborative user experience, is helping it stand a few steps away from most of its competitors.

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Its stock is currently trading at $58.92 with a market capitalization of $5.59 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $315.00 in June last year. It was trading at a 52-week low of $48.53 earlier this month.