LinkedIn now raking in over $10bn for Microsoft

The online professional networking platform that Microsoft acquired in 2016 has just become the third Microsoft business line in the last three years to cross over the USD$10bn annual revenue threshold, alongside Security and Gaming.

Discussing Microsoft’s results on Wednesday 28^th July (Sydney time), CEO Satya Nadella said LinkedIn now has 774 million members, and user sessions were up 30 per cent in the quarter compared with a year ago.

The professional networking site reported a 46 per cent jump in quarter-on-quarter revenue, driven by strong advertising demand in Marketing Solutions, to the tune of 97 per cent growth, year-on-year.

“In the past five years since our acquisition, revenue has nearly tripled and growth has accelerated,” Nadella said. “LinkedIn has become a leader across multiple secular growth areas spanning B2B advertising, professional hiring, corporate learning and sales intelligence.”

Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion. Since then, the company has only integrated LinkedIn’s products and services very limitedly with existing Microsoft ones. Microsoft has only taken initial steps to move LinkedIn over to being hosted on Azure, rather than on its own servers. Management insists this slow integration is by design and that their first concern has been to grow the LinkedIn user base.