Bengaluru: Professional networking company LinkedIn said its user base in India has crossed the 50 million mark. With that, India becomes only the second market outside the US where it has expanded its user base to that extent. To ensure that growth continues, LinkedIn has also piloted two new products in India over the past six months.
Around April last year, the company had a user base of about 42 million in India. That would imply a user base growth rate of roughly 19.04% from then till date. The user base has doubled over the past four years, LinkedIn said. Much of the growth in India has been driven by focusing on creating more localized offerings, according to the company. It does not give a breakup of its India revenue, but globally, that number grew at a faster clip on an annual basis in 2017.
“A lot of the (India growth) is fuelled by increasingly making the product more useful for tier II and III cities, focusing beyond knowledge professionals. In the last year, growth has re-accelerated for us by investing locally in markets like these,” said Akshay Kothari, country manager for India and head of international products.
For instance, in September 2016, the company’s India team launched the LinkedIn Lite website to cater to users in poor or low connectivity areas, especially in tier II and tier III towns. Last year, it created a mobile app version of LinkedIn Lite for Android users. Since connectivity issues are not restricted to India, the product was also launched globally and has crossed the 1 million download mark.
It has a similar plan in place now for two other India-based innovations. The resume builder was a project that LinkedIn’s India team kicked off about 6-9 months ago. It was officially launched a couple of weeks ago and has already been scaled to about half of its user base in the country. The new feature can be used to create resumes with the click of a button, using LinkedIn profiles as a base. This feature will soon be scaled across the rest of its user base in India, and will be taken to other countries too.
One of the company’s strategies in India has also been to focus on extending its platform to the blue collar workforce. Its second innovation is a foray into that. LinkedIn has partnered with IL&FS Skills Development Corp. to give students of some skilling streams a two-hour course on building and using a LinkedIn profile.
Going ahead, LinkedIn will also create more localized offerings to boost growth rates in its premium subscriptions business. Although the talent solutions business remains the company’s largest revenue earner in India, the premium subscriptions side is growing fast and has a lot of potential, Kothari said.
