Archives August 2016

China’s 51job sees 10.2% revenue boost

Integrated HR services provider 51job, based in China, has seen revenues increase 10.2% amid “stable” growth in the country’s white-collar recruitment market.

The results were announced in unaudited financial results for the second quarter of 2016 ended 30 June 2016.

The results, published yesterday, reveal total revenues increased to RMB559.8m (£64.1m) on Q2 2015, with gross margin of 71.8% compared with 72.8% in Q2 2015.

Commenting on the results, Rick Yan, president and chief executive, said: “With the white-collar recruitment market exhibiting relatively stable, modest growth in this time of economic transition in China, our strategic focus remains on increasing online customer spend and improving cross-selling of our other value-added HR services.

“Our sales efforts to deepen customer engagement are bearing fruit as average revenue per unique online employer has increased on a year-over-year basis for five consecutive quarters.

“We will continue to execute our initiatives in a disciplined manner. We are making important investments to strengthen our sales and customer service infrastructure, expand our new targeted job seeker platforms and capture additional HR-related opportunities, all while maintaining a track record of sustained profitability.”

51job results at a glance:

Total revenues increased 10.2% on Q2 2015 to RMB559.8m
Online recruitment services revenues increased 11.2% over Q2 2015 to RMB373.1m
Other human resource related revenues increased 9.1% over Q2 2015 to RMB186.6m, which reflected the impact of a value-added tax policy change effective 1 May 2016
Gross margin of 71.8% compared with 72.8% in Q2 2015
Income from operations increased 4.7% over Q2 2015 to RMB128.2m
Fully diluted earnings per share were RMB2.9

Northern Gas & Power launches radio recruitment drive

Energy firm Northern Gas & Power has taken to the airwaves to launch a recruitment drive for business account managers.

Radio Airtime Media, the radio advertising division of Media Agency Group, has launched a new North-East campaign on Capital FM to promote working at Northern Gas & Power. The 30-second radio commercials can be heard this summer as the energy supplier seeks to expand its businesses across new global offices.

The Newcastle-focused radio ads are targeting potential account managers, who will be interested in working at NGP’s North-East office on Gateshead Quayside.

KPMG listens to graduates and changes hiring process

Streamlining its recruitment processes for millennials makes good business sense for KPMG, as it proves the professional services firm has listened to feedback, says a spokesperson.

The comments come after news that KPMG has cut back on its recruitment processes for millennials, as Recruiter reported earlier this week. The firm has condensed its traditional three-stage recruitment process of first interview, assessment centre and final interview into a single day.

KPMG’s new streamlined approach, known as Launch Pad, also enables students to gain new skills, network with existing KPMG staff and partners, as well as their peers.

The firm’s move follows research carried out with market research company High Fliers Research that showed millennials were frustrated by lengthy recruitment processes (34%) and poor communication from their potential employer (43%), with over half complaining they did not receive any feedback when applying for a role.

A KPMG spokesperson told Recruiter in a statement it made good business sense for the firm to listen to views and feedback about graduate recruitment, and transform its practices to show graduates of all ages the firm listens to their feedback and adapts processes.

This is especially important, the spokesperson added, due to the “fierce” competition for the very best graduates, “even more so now big businesses are competing with smaller start-ups as well as their traditional competitors”.

The spokesperson said the new process provides more certainty to candidates about what will happen and when.

“Successful candidates will receive a job offer more quickly so that they can then focus on their studies and university life without needing to attend further interviews.

“There’s also the opportunity to learn a new skill. This will help them to determine whether KPMG is the right fit for them.”

The programme is being rolled out now for 2017 graduate trainees, while the firm will be running Launch Pad recruitment events around the country from October 2016.

Are going-out companies paying too much?

In the late 1980s, Japan had over-inflated stock and property markets. Its companies, fleeing the lack of opportunities in Japan itself, vastly overpaid for all manner of U.S. assets. I often dreamed that some Japanese investor would overpay for the house I owned at the time.

The rate of Chinese companies making overseas investments has more than doubled since last year. They often have a business model designed to bring technology and foreign business practices to the huge domestic Chinese market?a much better-defined plan than the Japanese, who were mostly purely financial investors, ever did. But, still I worry that they are paying too much.

Let’s take a look at a recent deal. Beijing-based LeEco Global Ltd announced last Tuesday that it agreed to pay $2 billion cash for Vizio Inc, a California-based manufacturer of inexpensive television sets and sound bars. This at a time when the dollar is high relative to the yuan. LeEco argued that Vizio will enable it to gain market share in the coming internet-of-things technology that links all kinds of smart products together. And, it certainly may turn out in that LeEco made a smart move in the long run. But, I still wonder about the pricing.

Vizio filed initial public offering papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in July of 2015, but never actually carried out the IPO. According to accounting data in the SEC filing, Vizio’s profits were $44.96 million in 2014 and $31.35 million in the first half of 2015.

Since Vizio is privately held and decided not to go through with the IPO, subsequent data are not available. But these numbers imply a profit of roughly $56 million in 2015, assuming that Vizio makes slightly more than half of its profits in the first half, as it did in 2014. Vizio has not been a growth company?its sales and profits in 2014 were about the same as in 2010 and were lower in the years in between.

Vizio’s business in the U.S. is in brutally competitive markets. Most consumers in the U.S. consider television sets to be almost undifferentiated commodities?they buy the cheapest one. Vizio has become the biggest-selling brand of TVs in the U.S. by following a low-price strategy. But, this strategy leads to very low margins?profits have averaged less than 3 percent of sales.

Vizio’s TVs are connected to the internet, so the company receives potentially valuable data on what shows its customers are watching. But, the company so far has not been able to reap profits from this information. In any case, William Wang, the current CEO and majority owner of Vizio, will retain 51 percent ownership of the Insight division, which will own this data.

The bottom line is that LeEco has agreed to pay about 35 times earnings for a producer of near-commodity products in a highly competitive business. This compares with Apple Inc, which currently trades for 11 times earnings, Google Inc at 30, and Samsung Electronics Co at 3.3.

If Vizio had completed its IPO and received 10 times earnings, which seems about right for a low-margin company, it would have had a market value of $600 million. Even at the current historically high average Dow Industrials price-to-earnings ratio of about 20, which is too high for a company in such a competitive market, Vizio would be worth $1.2 billion.

China Daily reported that Jia Yueting, founder and CEO of LeEco, said that the purchase of Vizio is part of a “big bang plan” to enter the U.S. market.

It may get access to Vizio’s distribution channels to sell its phones and other products?but, Vizio sells its TVs through big box stores, such as Best Buy Co Inc, which insist on paying low-margin prices to their suppliers.

It may be able to use its LeEco system to add value to the TVs, but Vizio made its name through low prices?proving that customers are reluctant to pay more for sophisticated TVs. Just about every merger or acquisition is justified on the basis of “synergies”, but few actually pay off.

Companies spending their own money have more incentive to get it right than does an outside analyst like myself. But, I do hope the current wave of Chinese companies going-out are not paying too much.

(By David Blair)

Uber China team to get 6 months base salary and equity vesting as bonus

After China’s ride-hailing market leader Didi Chuxing confirmed Monday that it will acquire Uber’s business in China, Uber China held a staff meeting in the evening, announcing that the company will pay a cash Close Bonus in recognition of Uber China team’s contribution, according to a report by technology media site tech.sina.com.cn,

The bonus will be valued at 6 months base salary and 6 months equity vesting that includes new hire grants, performance bonus and referral bonus.

The company said half of the bonus will be paid in cash within one week after the merger closes and the remaining half will be paid to employees one month after the closes.

Only employees who have worked with Didi or Uber for at least 30 days after the signing of the deal are qualified to receive the remaining half of the bonus.

Didi’s acquisition of Uber China’s business will give Uber a 5.89 percent stake in Didi, and Didi will also gain a stake valued at $68 billion in Uber’s global business.

Apart from Uber’s chief executive officer Travis Kalanick’s blog post, Uber China officials have not commented on the acquisition yet.

Low private investment, high debt weigh down growth

Beginning with the second quarter of the year, China will be in the do-or-die battle of its economic transition, according to Hong Kong-based researchers.

The country’s transition will undergo its most difficult stage, although it will probably maintain around 6 percent growth in GDP in the second half of the year, according to economists and financial analysts recently surveyed by China Daily.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the economy saw year-on-year growth of 6.7 percent in the second quarter, slightly above market expectations. The second quarter’s growth rate was the same as in the previous quarter.

The growth was powered by retail sales, industrial output and new loans directed to fixed-asset investment.

But several things are at the center of concern, said Sun Mingchun, senior partner and chief economist of China Broad Capital Co Ltd, including an excess of industrial capacity, a large total social financing and a high leverage ratio, meaning a high level of debt.

Private investment was 15.9 trillion yuan ($2.39 trillion) in the first half of 2016. Its annualized growth rate fell from 3.9 percent in the first five months to 2.8 percent in the first half of the year, which means there was quite a dip in June alone.

Private companies are not seeing encouraging returns from their investments in most industries. And they probably still will not see a good profit in the next two to three years, Sun said.

By contrast, the State sector investment rose an impressive 23.5 percent in the first half of the year, concentrating mostly on infrastructure development in the less-developed areas.

But so much investment is still not as powerful a driver of growth as consumer spending, especially that on services, said Fielding Chen, Asia economist for Bloomberg Intelligence. If investment sees a further decline in the second half of the year, which he expects, the economy’s growth engine will remain weak.

According to Cui Li, managing director and director of macroeconomic research at CCB International, the economy will be in its difficult period because it is facing an “unprecedented balancing risk”, including “weaker-than-ever global demand, need for a sharper-than-expected capacity cut for the industry, and a round of bond defaults that weigh on investor sentiment.”

Ding Shuang, head of China research at Standard Chartered Plc, said that although the hard landing scenario is less likely to happen, the mainland economic situation will remain complex, with questions about how to deal with its mounting debt and avoid the threat of capital outflow.

Ding expects that in the coming months of the year, China’s fiscal policy will keep expanding while its monetary policy will be neutral. Cutting the reserve requirement ratio for banks may be the best way to enlarge the credit supply. But before the RRR is cut, the government may use reverse repos and lower interest rates on the medium-term lending facility.

Debt is a particularly ugly spot, the researchers said. As measured by Fitch Ratings Inc’s Adjusted Measure of Total Social Financing, credit to companies, local governments and households rose as much as 15 percent in 2015 in the Chinese mainland, more than double its GDP growth.