XING, the leading online business network in German-speaking countries, is today publishing its preliminary results for 2015. According to these results, the company achieved some great milestones in terms of member growth and revenues.
Total revenues grew by 21% to €123 million and the company’s profits almost tripled, compared to last year. The main source of revenues was the paid memberships business, which grew by 19% to €73.0 million. In total, XING acquired almost 46,000 new paying members during 2015, with over 880,000 members using XING’s paid products (Premium and ProJobs). The E-Recruiting segment was again the most important growth driver with revenues growing by 26% year on year to €41.4 million. Revenues from Events, the smallest revenue-generating segment, rose by 22% to €6.2 million.
Thomas Vollmoeller, CEO at XING AG, said: “2015 was a year of growth. We saw significant growth in every segment of the business. We also further accelerated member growth over the past year. It’s great to see that this positive trend is continuing this year as we’re now already close to the 10 million member mark.”
In total, around 1.6 million people registered on the platform as new members in 2015, which is the highest figure the company has ever seen in a single year. As of the end of 2015, XING had 9.6 million members in its core German-speaking market.
Most recently, the Hamburg-based company launched XING Jobs, which provides users in German-speaking countries with a single platform for current job vacancies. In contrast to conventional job boards, XING Jobs is strictly aimed at modern knowledge workers by offering vacancies that follow conventional career paths as well as part-time jobs and vacancies for people in search of meaning. Since the new XING Jobs was launched, traffic levels there have more than doubled. The new Jobs section is the result of acquiring and subsequently integrating jobbörse.com. XING took over the company at the start of 2015 and expanded its Jobs section based on the acquired crawling technology so that users now have access to around 1 million jobs there.
In the autumn of 2015, XING developed and launched a new journalistic offering: XING Klartext. This is a new offering where experts and well-known people can exclusively voice their opinions on current and controversial issues related to business and careers. XING members can then start up and join a debate. This journalistic offering is provided a seven-person editorial team headed by publisher Roland Tichy, former editor-in-chief at Wirtschaftswoche, and editor-in-chief Jennifer Lachman, formerly of the Financial Times Deutschland. In the months that have passed since its launch, Klartext articles have already been clicked on more than 1.2 million times. XING’s total news offering currently has a reach of around 2.6 million unique users per month.
XING AG was founded in 2013 by Lars Hinrichs in Hamburg. Since 2006, the company is publicly listed, ans since 20122 traded the TecDAX.