China’s leading online recruitment platform Zhaopin has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for IPO under the ticker symbol of “ZPIN” on NYSE to raise up to $100 million funds.
As one of the pioneers in Chinese recruiting industry, Zhaopin, which means “hire” or “recruit” in Chinese, was founded in 1994 by Steven Chiu, etc. It is engaged in connecting users with relevant job opportunities throughout their career lifecycle with a special focus on educated and skilled users. The site claimed more than 74 million registered users as of 2013 and approximately 10.5 million job postings from 250K unique customers in the fiscal year ended June, 2013.
Zhaopin recorded $147 million of revenue in the fiscal year ended in June 2013. The company’s revenue mainly comes from online recruitment, campus recruitment, assessment and other human resources related services. For the same period, these four businesses accounted for 84.3%, 7.6%, 3.7% and 4.3% of the total revenue, respectively.
Principal shareholders of the company include Seek International, Australia’s largest online job site, and Cavalane Holdings, which own 79% and 19.3% of the company’s stake.
Over the past few years, online recruitment landscape in China has changed rapidly. More new recruiting platforms are challenging the dominance of the three traditional leading sites like Zhaopin, 51job and ChinaHr, with their focus on different groups of job seekers and integration of SNS features. On the other hand, several Chinese classifieds sites like Ganji and 58.com also provide recruiting services.
The rising recruitment services are chased by investors. Liepin, a recruiting services for top-tier talents, received $70 million of Series C funding this April. Neitui, a recruiting service focused on IT talents, announced 2.5 million yuan (around $407K) of angel investment last year. Crowdsourcing recruiting app Renren Headhunting raised two rounds of financing within five months last year. Moreover, career-focused social networking service Linkedin also landed in Chinese market this Feb.
Although the three traditional leading services still take a lion’s share in the market, they are lagging behind new competitors in terms of growth rate.
image credit: Zhaopin
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