Linkedin closes jobs website in China as US platforms quit

LINKEDIN will shut down its app in China, closing one of the last big US internet platforms still operating in the country.

The professional social network, owned by Microsoft, will close its jobs website in China later this summer, Ryan Roslansky, its chief executive, told staff. Mr Roslansky said Linkedin had struggled to establish itself in the country as he also announced that Linkedin would cut 716 employees.

The job losses are partly because Linkedin is closing almost all of its operations in China, as well as conducting a wider restructuring owing to “shifts in customer behaviour and slower revenue growth”.

The company said it would retain a small team in the country to support Chinese employers using the service to hire overseas.

Linkedin launched in China in 2014 but shut off most aspects of the social network in 2021 amid rising internet censorship from Beijing. It retained a stripped down version of its website focused on job listings, without the messaging and commenting features.

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are all banned in China, where social networks are closely monitored for posts criticising the country’s leaders.

Meanwhile, Tiktok, the short-form video app owned by China’s Bytedance, has been banned on government devices in many Western countries and is facing further crackdowns in the US.

Linkedin had agreed to censor posts on its social network when it launched in China, but gradually found the situation untenable as tensions between Washington and Beijing rose.

When the company shut down most of Linkedin’s features in October 2021, it blamed a “significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China”.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, operates in China, making it the only foreign search engine in the country.

Mr Roslansky said Linkedin’s Chinese operation had struggled against local rivals. “Though Incareer [Linkedin’s jobs website in China] experienced some success in the past year thanks to our strong China-based team, it also encountered fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate,” he added.

Linkedin has around 20,000 employees in total. Its revenues grew by 8pc in the last quarter, down from 10pc in the previous quarter and 17pc before that.

Other tech companies including Uber and Airbnb have also pulled out of China because of local difficulties.