Data interpretation: LinkedIn, an American professional social networking site

As a traditional recruitment company, Monster has also been under great sales pressure in the past year, with average stock performance and recent selling pressure. Faced with new competitors from all sides, competition in the recruitment industry is becoming increasingly fierce.

About LinkedIn

In 2002, Reid Hoffman and his partners co-founded LinkedIn in his living room. On May 5, 2003, the website was officially launched. LinkedIn is headquartered in Mountain View, California, USA. It is currently the world's largest professional social networking site, with 300 million members (as of April 18, 2014), and members are spread across 200 countries and regions around the world.

LinkedIn is a broad and professional platform for professionals to expand their business networks, find the best career opportunities, and for professional organizations to find the best career candidates. The company platform enables registered members to have a more successful career: manage and share digital identity authentication; participate and expand their network through professional social networking sites; and tap into professional knowledge and insights to better engage in their careers. Members create the core of the platform, and accordingly, the company will provide members with applications and tools to help them compete effectively in the workplace, make decisions quickly, and manage their careers.
Company development history:

Website features:

Manage and publish your professional profile to find and recommend yourself to potential clients, service providers or professionals in related fields.

Create and collaborate on projects, collect data, and share files.

Find potential partners and like-minded professionals to form discussion groups privately.

Post and distribute job information for job hunting, recruitment, headhunting, etc.

Publish personal work experience and establish employment relationship between enterprises and individuals.

Understand the work dynamics of friends, recommend or be recommended job opportunities, conduct background checks on companies that interest you, conduct background checks on employees that interest you, search for job opportunities, ask friends for job opinions, initiate opinion polls, search for employees with specific skills, backgrounds and experiences, classify people's personalities, hobbies and occupations, provide targeted information services, and organize theme activities.
Website Features:

LinkedIn provides "efficient", "safe" and "commercially valuable" social service products: LinkedIn is efficient, there is no information that disturbs users, even the advertising is well handled (advertising placed below the right sidebar should not distract users); there are not too many people on the website that will disturb users, and the relationship between users is strictly protected; focusing on business functions and providing paid services greatly demonstrates that it does have the ability to provide high-quality business social services. LinkedIn is a very suitable SNS tool for professional white-collar workers, especially corporate employees or freelancers with international business. However, LinkedIn does not seem to be suitable for students. Because LinkedIn pays much attention to work experience and educational background, unless you have quite rich social practice experience.

Social media represented by LinkedIn has developed rapidly in the field of job hunting, and is gradually replacing the traditional job hunting model and becoming an increasingly popular target for college graduates. As a social media, LinkedIn can achieve outstanding results in job hunting for graduates because it continuously provides interaction between companies and graduates, as well as various information provided to graduates and companies. College students are the main force of social media users. While providing a job hunting platform for graduates, LinkedIn also increases its own users.



LinkedIn's global distribution of registered members (as of April 18, 2014, the number of registered members worldwide reached 300 million):

Company Management:

LinkedIn company operations and financial data analysis:

Comparative analysis of LinkedIn’s comparable companies:

On May 1, 2014, the company released its first quarter 2014 performance report, which showed that LinkedIn's revenue in the first quarter was $473 million, up 46% from $325 million in the same period last year, while its net loss was $13.4 million, compared with a net profit of $22.6 million in the same period last year, and a basic loss per share of $0.11.

Although LinkedIn has performed poorly in the stock market recently, it is no exaggeration to say that LinkedIn is a successful company created in the era of big data. Many social networking sites such as Finder and Myspace have been popular for a while, but the endings seem to be the same, experiencing viral growth and viral demise. Facebook's stock price has gone through a series of "roller coaster" spiral fluctuations, and its stock price trend proves that it will eventually return to rationality. Only LinkedIn has maintained steady growth for 9 years (as shown by the company's user growth, product diversification, and profitability), but it still has a long way to go in the future.

It is gratifying that the company's various operating indicators are developing relatively healthily, which is still worth looking forward to. However, I would like to remind investors that LinkedIn's forward PE has reached about 61 times. The decline in stock prices at such a high valuation level is a reflection of value return. There is no stock in the stock market that will always rise.