Sales increased by a good 11 percent to 18.19 million euros thanks to new customers and growing business areas. The outgoing head of xing, stefan grob-selbeck, attributed the higher costs to the expansion of the workforce, including in the sales area. "On the other hand, we have hired developers who are building new products, which will be introduced in the near future," grob-selbeck told dpa. These products were later also used to generate additional revenues.
The internet platform continued to be successful in the e-recruiting segment with personnel services for companies, where sales increased by 24 percent to 6.8 million euros.
The network also generated more revenue from paid memberships, by far the most important source of income. Worldwide, the number of paying customers increased by a good three percent to 793,000, of which 767,000 were in the german-speaking region. Membership sales increased by five percent to 11.9 million euros. Including non-paying customers, the contact network reportedly has 12.4 million members worldwide, a good eleven percent more than a year ago.
Grob-selbeck emphasized the good structural conditions for further growth: "demographic change is leading to a shortage of skilled workers, which means that companies will be forced to actively search for and address employees themselves." To place an ad and wait for resumes to come in – "that will soon be a thing of the past".
Xing is also indirectly feeling the effects of the euro debt crisis, said grob-selbeck. "What we are noticing is that our corporate customers are feeling a greater sense of insecurity than they did a year ago. This is reflected in the fact that they are a little more hesitant when it comes to buying job advertisements." So they wish they had more time to use their packages of 50 or 100 job ads – because they don’t know how many employees they want to hire in the next few months.
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