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Zumba CEO on how the company is adapting to virtual fitness

Alberto Perlman, Zumba Fitness CEO, joined Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland, Dan Roberts, and Melody Hahm to discuss how the company has adapted to the new virtual fitness landscape.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, welcome back to "The Final Round" here on Yahoo Finance. Myles Udland with you in New York. We are joined now by Alberto Perlman. He is the CEO of Zumba Fitness. Alberto, let's start with what changes you guys have had to make, what the business this looks like right now, and how Zumba is handling this world of COVID uncertainty.

ALBERTO PERLMAN: Yeah, well, thank you for having me. As we were closing down our office at the beginning of March, we kept thinking, what are we going to do for our instructors? We have the biggest fitness instructor network in the world. It spans 186 countries. And we're thinking, how are we going to make sure that our instructors are going to be able to feed their families? How are they going to survive?

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So we started teaching them on how to teach online classes. And they started teaching through Zoom, and then our tech team developed our own platform called ZIN Studio, and now we have classes listed on Zuma.Dance, www.Zumba.Dance. You can go take a virtual class.

What we saw was amazing. The instructors were thriving-- are thriving-- teaching these online classes. They are connecting with their communities. Zumba is much more than just fitness for most people who take it. It's like therapy. It helps them connect with other people. And we're just seeing a lot of people just come together and taking these virtual classes, and it really makes me so proud.

I'm seeing letters from our instructors saying, thank you, I was able to feed my family. Not only that, I'm actually making more money now than I was making when I was teaching at the gym. Or were getting letters from students saying, thank you so much for helping and allowing our instructors to teach online because it is one hour, the one hour that's for me during the day that keeps me sane. Some people are doing it with their families. It truly is an incredible movement, and I am so proud of our instructor network.

And tomorrow, we're launching something that's really amazing, which is we've partnered with food banks around the world in 43 different countries. And for every class that somebody takes on Zumba.Dance on-- with any instructor, we will donate a meal. So the Zumba company is going to donate a meal for every class that anybody takes. Some classes are free. Some classes are paid. Some classes are for donations. But it truly is just to help the world and help our instructors get more students.

MELODY HAHM: Alberto, thinking about the dozens of countries Zumba is located in, have you opened up any of the studios yet? I know a lot of them are held at community centers and different sorts of places. Can you give us a sense of reopening?

ALBERTO PERLMAN: There's three countries that have reopened, so Vietnam, Israel, and China.

MELODY HAHM: And how are you seeing the kind of resurgence? Are people flooding back in? Is there a lot of caution? How do you anticipate this kind of foretelling the rest of the openings?

ALBERTO PERLMAN: So one thing we're seeing outside of those three countries is outdoor Zumba classes. We're seeing a lot of outdoor Zumba classes in states that are allowing people-- here in the States and in countries that are allowing outdoors. And in countries-- for example, in Israel, they're doing an amazing job of keeping people safe.

They've actually put markings on the floor of the group exercise rooms where people have to stand six feet apart. Everybody's walking in with masks. There's disinfectants everywhere, and nobody's touching anything. It really is truly amazing to see everybody working together to keep their studio safe.

DAN ROBERTS: Alberto, Dan Roberts here. Thanks for joining us.

ALBERTO PERLMAN: Hey, Dan.

DAN ROBERTS: We've had a number of fitness execs come through the live shows in the last few weeks, and everyone talks about, you know, we now have really done a lot with our digital strategy, and we're optimistic. But a lot of analysts think that a number of industries, and fitness and in-person gyms included, are going to change permanently after this time, or at least maybe for the next year, even once the economies reopen. I mean, how concerned are you guys that people won't want to go to an in-person gym anymore and that during this time, they will have gotten more used to doing classes and workouts at home, and they might not want to come back to Zumba gyms, even once they've reopened?

ALBERTO PERLMAN: Right, well, we don't own any gyms, per se. So we are an education company. We train instructors. Our instructors are our members, and our instructors go out and teach in other people's facilities. They'll teach at Equinox. They'll teach at 24 Hour Fitness. They'll teach in different clubs. And we're trying to support the clubs during this process.

I think that humans, by nature, are social, and they want to be in social environments. And whether that community is online, like the ones we've built, or that communities offline, I think people will continue to look for different ways.

What we've seen is in these outdoor classes that have started is that they're getting packed. We've seen outdoor classes with 100 people coming together to do them. So there's people who will want to do it in person, and there's people who will want to do it online. I think the fitness industry is just going to continue to grow because people realized that-- how important it is to be fit. People who are more fit are less prone to dying with this virus. It's so apparent. Everybody is exercising at home, and everybody is going to continue to exercise. So I think this is good for both the offline and the online and fitness world that people are realizing how important it is to be fit.

MELODY HAHM: In some ways, Zumba is like the godfather of the cardio fitness industry. Now we have DanceBody, Sculpt Society, 305 Fitness, just to name a few that really use Zumba as the core foundation, right? When you look at the landscape right now, are you afraid of decision fatigue and that, perhaps, the OG is not going to be credited for a lot of this, as a lot of younger millennials say, hey, you know, Zumba's what my mom did. Zumba's what my aunt did. I'm going to try to find new avenues to work out.

ALBERTO PERLMAN: What we're seeing is a ton of millennials coming to Zumba. Not only millennials, we're actually seeing Gen Z coming into Zumba, people realizing how fun it is, people realizing that it's not only about those super hardcore workouts. Those are great, but some people just want to have fun, too. And Zumba is very easy to follow, super fun. And, you know, Zumba is the number one class in every college campus. You go to any college campus and ask, what's the most attended cardio class, and it's Zumba.

MYLES UDLAND: All right, Alberto Perlman is the CEO of Zumba. Again, the company's initiative tomorrow, take one virtual Zumba class. They'll donate one meal delivered to someone impacted by COVID-19. Alberto, thanks for joining us again. Great to talk with you, and we'll talk soon.

ALBERTO PERLMAN: Thank you for having me.