LinkedIn Shows Quarterly Success, Sees Stock Price Raise
posted Saturday Aug 1, 2015 by Scott Ertz
When LinkedIn had their initial public offering, they proved social could be successful - something that Facebook and Groupon were not able to do. Since then, however, LinkedIn has never really shined, though they have not failed, either; they have lived right in the middle, uninteresting results. There have been no major gains nor losses in terms of user count, revenue or profit.
This past quarter saw a change for the company, with gains in many of their key metric. Their revenue was up 33%, an incredible feat for a company with total revenue in the $712 million range. They saw a 32% increase in Marketing Solutions revenue, as well as a 22% increase in premium subscription revenue. These numbers were all accomplished on 380 million members. CEO Jeff Weiner said of the quarter,
LinkedIn continued to deliver increased member and customer value in the second quarter while delivering solid financial results. We continued to invest in our long-term strategic roadmap and began integrating the acquisition of lynda.com that closed during the quarter.
This quarter included the $1.5 billion acquisition of Lynda.com, a launch of new product Elevate, as well as re-launching Pulse, the news app they purchased in 2013. Being able to accomplish all of this and see such growth in revenue shows a company that is quickly becoming capable of juggling multiple business priorities at once, something once unheard of from LinkedIn. As a result, the company's stock price rose an impressive 7%, based entirely on their earnings report. It is a good time for this, as they are recovering from a 12-month low, which was its lowest stock price since their earnings report for this quarter last year.
Hopefully LinkedIn will be able to continue this progress and get their price back to where it was only 5 months ago. Being able to succeed on multiple fronts, such as Pulse and Elevate, as well as integrating the training services of Lydia into their business goals, could be a big part of that growth.