China’s premier job-hunting site got an impressive raise in its first day as a public company in the US, as its stock closed up 8.5 per cent on their debut day of trading.
Zhaopin, whose name means “recruit,” is a LinkedIn-like site for professional networking and job seeking. Its shares closed at $14.65. It had priced its offering of 5.6m American depositary shares at $13.50 each – the middle of an indicated range of $12.50 to $14.50. That means it raised a total of about $76m, excluding an over allotment option.
The career platform’s relatively successful IPO comes in a choppy market for listings.
A selloff in April and May for high-growth companies calmed what had been a torrid market at the start of the year. Companies with strong business lines, scale or profits are still finding demand. Zhaopin’s own operating margins are 25 per cent, the company says.
“We are actually making money and growing fast,” said CEO Evan Guo, a former partner with McKinsey.
The job-matching market in China, particularly for white collar workers, is booming. Professionals switch jobs far more frequently than their US and European counterparts, and the service sector is growing faster in China than in the West.
That appeal of Zhaopin’s market has brought competitors, both homegrown and foreign—notably, LinkedIn, which formally launched in China earlier this year.
The difference, says Mr Guo, is that LinkedIn is a bit more elite, and therefore smaller, than Zhaopin, which has 77.1m registered users compared with LinkedIn’s 4m in China. Recruiters in China say they use LinkedIn more often to find Chinese nationals who have worked overseas or speak foreign languages, while Zhaopin and another local competitor 51Jobs, are better for more local candidates.
China’s cultural nuances also mean their sites run differently, he added. Zhaopin focuses on linking people with would-be employers and recruiters and emphases social networking and discussion with ones’ peers less that LinkedIn.
That is in part because people in China “don’t want to make their private network public,” said Mr Guo. (It also might be relevant that Chinese laws about social networking—and the need to censor what content is share—are rather strict, a fact LinkedIn has already encountered and had to tweak its platform in response to.)
“China is a much more hierarchical society. You can LinkedIn among peers, but if you LinkedIn among people who are higher ranked than you, you will face some difficulties and also if you LinkedIn among people who are lower ranked,” he said.
http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2014/06/job-market-in-china-proves-hot-market-for-us-investors/?
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