XING, the German-born social network for professionals which has spread across Europe and Asia and now competes with Silicon Valley’s LinkedIn, has released its annual report and the numbers look pretty good. It’s met its annual guidance for 2007 with revenues of €19.61 million ( about $30.98 million) and the member base increased by over 3 million members (through acquisitions and organically) reaching nearly 5 million. By contrast LinkedIn has a million members in the UK and another four million across Europe. It claims to have the highest growth in paying members in social networking. It has also established new revenue streams in eCommerce and advertising.
In its first full financial year, XING achieved revenues of €19.61 million and an operating EBITDA of €6.89 million. This corresponds to an EBITDA margin of approximately 35.2 percent. Earnings per share for FY 2007 amounted to €1.10. In other words it nearly doubled revenue for the year and achieved an EBITDA margin of 30-35 percent.
Over the last year it has acquired the Spanish platforms eConozco and Neurona, bringing its member base to approximately 4.83 million. At the end of the financial year, XING had approximately 362,000 paying members, up from 221,000 paying members at the end of 2006. A few weeks ago, XING says it hit 400,000 paying members.
The “eCommerce” it introduced in October 2007 contributed approximately €0.40 million in revenue, mainly from job listings posted on the platform. Advertising started around the same time and resulted in revenue of €0.75 million
I really wonder what the exit strategy is with XING, but Given that LinkedIn is probably going to want to scale even more across Europe and Asia, XING seems like it’s well on the road to becoming an acquisition merger target. In 2006 XING IPO’d raising €35.7M.
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