Table of Contents
Company Overview 2
Review of Financials 4
Industry Analysis 6
Rivalry 6
Threat of Substitute Products and Services 8
Bargaining Power of LinkedIn Users (Purchasers) 10
Bargaining Power of Suppliers 12
Company Overview
Since the start of human race, every once in a while a dramatic change happen in history due to a revolution. Not to go far back, in the past century we had the industrial revolution, which changed and reshaped countries economically, demographically and almost in every aspect. Now, since the start of the new millennium, a new revolution came to shape a new era of human lives, which is the revolution of “Social Media & Social Networking”. With simple calculations, we can find that 25.03% 1 of total human population are using social media. Out of them, 17.19%2 are on LinkedIn. See Exhibits 1 & 2.
LinkedIn is the largest professional network service (PNS) with 313 million members in over 200 countries around the globe as of 30 June 2014. In addition, 3 million companies have registered pages on the website and 94 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn’s corporate talents solution3.
Unlike other online social networks like Facebook and Myspace, LinkedIn has a different value proposition, which according CEO Jeff Weiner4 is to “Connect talent with opportunity at massive scale”. The mission of LinkedIn is simply to “connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful5” premised on its vision to create “economic opportunity for every professional in the world”.
LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2002, and it was officially launched on May 5, 2003. Jeff Weiner is the current CEO, and the company's management team is made up of seasoned executives from companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, PayPal, and Electronic Arts. LinkedIn completed its initial public offering in May 2011 and has a diversified business model with revenues coming...