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Australia – SEEK CEO confident company will remain market leader

28 November 2014

Andrew Bassat, CEO of Australian job board SEEK, says he is not fearful that popular US professional network site LinkedIn could emerge as a dominant force in the Australian job placement market, reports theaustralian.com.au

While LinkedIn has been active in Australia for several years it does not have much to show in terms of market share.

Mr Bassat told SEEK’s annual general meeting that the company was experiencing positive trading conditions, with revenue since the start of the financial year “slightly ahead’’ of internal expectations.

He said that compared to previous expectations, released at the time of its 2014 full-year results in August, SEEK now expects strong growth in revenue in 2015, against earlier forecasts of solid growth.

There will be an increase in operational expenditure due to re-investment in growth opportunities across placement strategy and technology. Pre-tax earnings growth in pre-tax earnings are expected to be at a slightly lower rate than revenue growth.

Turning to the competitive landscape, Mr Bassat said the company was quite a few steps ahead of online boards, such as LinkedIn, which along with other professional and social network sites are starting to threaten traditional employment businesses, such as Seek.

“LinkedIn is a great company and they have done a very good job overseas ... I think we have been well and truly on to it for the last couple of years and the net result is that we provide a much better service than job boards overseas,’’ Mr Bassat said.

“And the fact that we still account for 22% of placements, I think LinkedIn is less than 2% of placements, despite them being in the Australian market for five years, and reality in terms of actual outcomes is that we are a long, long way in front and they haven’t been gaining on us at all.’’

Mr Bassat said he seemed to have a much more upbeat assessment of Australia’s economic and employment outlook than some of his fellow CEOs despite fears of a jobs slowdown caused by the pullback in the iron ore price and scaling back of projects in resource rich states such as Western Australia.

“I think what we have seen is lost jobs, obviously in WA and in mining, but we have seen gains on the eastern seaboard and gains in industries like finance, other service industries, and even areas like retail, so the net result has actually been gains rather than loss,” he said. “We certainly have a more positive view on the economy than a lot of the other CEOs for some reason.’’

Mr Bassat added that there was plenty of growth to come from Asia, especially China where any slowdown in the economy had not affected it as yet.