LinkedIn is also eyeing growth in Indonesia as people look to acquire skills and seek jobs through the platform.
TOKYO: Business platform LinkedIn sees growing opportunities in India and Indonesia as ambitious young professionals look to acquire skills and seek jobs through the platform, the US company’s regional head told Nikkei Asia.
LinkedIn already has about 96 million members in India – vying with China to be the world’s most populous country – and 21 million in Indonesia – the fourth most populous – making them key markets for a platform with about 875 million global users. It now aims to further penetrate the two emerging markets, eyeing second and third-tier cities in India while preparing the Indonesian-language translation of its e-learning content next year.
“We’re seeing that members in India engage a lot more on our platform,” Feon Ang, LinkedIn’s managing director for Asia Pacific and Japan, said in a recent interview in Tokyo. “They’re always looking for opportunities, they are gaining knowledge from the platform.”
A subsidiary of Microsoft, LinkedIn’s revenue streams include online learning courses in which employers pay for programmes to let their employees acquire knowledge and skills. Companies also use LinkedIn as a hiring platform to find talent.
“As India’s economy grows and more companies set up businesses in the country, companies will need a lot more talent, they will need to create a retention strategy to make sure that people feel invested, meaning that they are creating learning opportunities for their employees,” Ang said.
India is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, with its economy projected to grow 7.2% in 2023, according to the Asian Development Bank’s latest economic outlook. The country’s young professionals are “hungry for growth”, she said, leading to high engagement with the platform.
Having nearly 100 million members in India out of a population of about 1.4 billion people, she said LinkedIn has already been “highly successful” in the country’s tier-1, or biggest, cities such as Mumbai. “As we move into tier-2 and tier-3 cities we are beginning to pick up a lot of momentum as well,” she said, referring to Pune, a city in the country’s west, and Kolkata, in the east.
“We’re beginning to see a lot more activities, a lot more companies demanding services like LinkedIn, to hire people and to make learning available for employees as the country is very heavy on the tech sector,” she said, adding that LinkedIn’s learning courses on technology meet these requirements.
Meanwhile, Ang said users in Indonesia show “quite similar behaviour” to those in India. The country also has a young and growing workforce, and foreign businesses are pouring investments into what is Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
As part of its Indonesia expansion strategy, LinkedIn in the April-June quarter will start offering its online learning courses with machine-translated subtitles, she said.
As for developed markets in the Asia-Pacific region, the trend of government-led worker “reskilling” is going to be a key growth driver for the company, according to Ang.
Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida has set updating and acquiring new skills as a critical element of his economic policy, encouraging workers to adapt to new areas, such as digital and green technology.
“The prime minister of Japan is very interested in making sure that people in Japan understand the importance of reskilling and upskilling,” Ang said. “So we think there is a huge opportunity ahead of us in terms of what LinkedIn can offer the people in Japan.”
LinkedIn has about 3 million users in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy with about 125 million people. She said the company plans to partner with more corporations to offer learning courses for their employees. In addition, she said it is also encouraging university students to have a LinkedIn profile when they graduate.
In the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, LinkedIn generated total revenue of US$13.8 billion, up 34% from the previous year, according to financial statements from Microsoft. However, with a global economic slowdown projected next year, Ang acknowledged there would be a certain impact on hiring rates, which could affect LinkedIn’s businesses.
But she stressed some sectors – retail, hospitality and healthcare – are performing well and that companies continue to look for talent with new skills.
“Companies continuously need people to further the growth of their business,” she said. “So they are looking at new skills that are in demand, like data analytics, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. These will continue to be the skills that are in demand, and there will always be a need for human resources.”
