Listing does not raise funds, but direct employment by BOSS still makes money

On December 22, Boss Zhipin officially completed its dual primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by way of introduction. The opening price was HK$77.85.

This year’s Boss Direct Employment can be described as a series of happy events. First, it successfully landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today to complete the second listing, and the financing channels have become more stable; second, the one-year suspension of new user registration control has been lifted; It has turned losses into profits for six consecutive months, and the basic market has stabilized.

However, at the moment when Hong Kong stocks are not willing to start new businesses, it is not the best time to go public now, and Boss Zhipin is so resolute, which can also expose some of Boss Zhipin’s current anxiety: facing the risk of delisting in the United States, more than half of the revenue The marketing expenses of the company remain high, and there are hidden concerns from the side of data security and technical strength. The seemingly steady pace of Boss Zhipin may not be as calm as expected.

Dual listing, an extra layer of safety cushion

Many companies know in their hearts that this year is not the best time to go public.

According to public data, as of December 14, there were 76 IPOs in the Hong Kong stock market, raising a total of HK$107.6 billion. The number of IPOs and the amount of funds raised have decreased by 21% and 68% respectively compared with the previous year. According to Ernst & Young statistics, 35% of new shares have failed on the first day of issuance this year. percentage point.

But for Boss Zhipin, now is the best time to return to Hong Kong for listing.

Since the beginning of this year, Chinese concept stock companies have suffered a crazy drop in the U.S. stock market. As of December 22, the stock price of Boss Direct Employment has fallen by as much as 42.72%. The sword of Chris, the announcement shows that Boss Zhipin has been included in the list in May this year.

Returning to Hong Kong for listing obviously adds a layer of safety cushion to Boss Zhipin, ensuring the stability of its financing. This time, Boss Zhipin chooses to achieve dual primary listing in Hong Kong through introduction. That is to say, Boss Zhipin does not involve new stock financing when it returns to Hong Kong for listing. However, if it is delisted from the US stock market in the future, it will not affect its listing in the Hong Kong stock market. transaction.

The second is the moment when money is burned but not short of money, which is the most relaxed match point for direct hiring by Boss

In 2019, 2020, 2021 and the first half of 2022, the marketing expenses of Boss Zhipin will be 917 million yuan, 1.348 billion yuan, 1.943 billion yuan and 921 million yuan respectively, accounting for 91.8% and 69.3% of the revenue respectively , 45.6% and 41%.

It is worth noting that Zhao Peng, the founder of Boss Direct Employment, once stated at the 2021 third quarter financial report performance meeting that the company aims to add 100 million new users in the next three years. Behind the huge traffic, it needs to continue to pay marketing costs. According to insiders in the industry, the advertising cost of “psoriasis” on the field of this World Cup exceeded 100 million. Compared with the massive daily marketing operations of boss direct employment, the company still thinks it is quite cost-effective. Spent 100 million on advertising.

According to the prospectus, as of June 2022, there will be a total of 10.692 billion yuan in cash and cash equivalents on the Boss direct employment account. Although it seems that there is no shortage of money, in terms of development, Boss Zhipin, who has a sense of slack at the moment, chooses not to conduct new financing to go public, demonstrating that he is not short of money and adding to the market, while also leaving himself with refinancing in the future the back road.

The prospectus shows that in 2019, 2020, 2021 and the first half of 2022, the revenue of Boss direct employment will be 987 million yuan, 1.927 billion yuan, 4.219 billion yuan and 2.227 billion yuan respectively; correspondingly, Boss direct employment will lose money in the same period 502 million yuan, 942 million yuan, 1.071 billion yuan, and a profit of 80 million yuan. It will be profitable for the first time in 2022.

In addition, according to the CIC report, as of June 30, 2022, the average monthly active users of Boss Zhipin reached 25.9 million. It is the largest online recruitment platform in China, accounting for 6.1% of the online recruitment industry market share, exceeding the industry Double the second.

Although the Hong Kong stock market is relatively sluggish this year, there are always some high-quality assets that perform well. As a reference, China CDF, the largest IPO case of the year, has once risen by more than 40% since it was listed in Hong Kong this year. Nearly 4000 times.

It is not difficult to understand that Boss Zhipin, which has healthy fundamentals, still chooses to go public at this time.

Boss Zhipin is becoming “stupid”?

Zhao Peng, the founder of Boss Direct Employment, once said when explaining the product idea, “The closer you are to the result, the closer you can be to the money.” Therefore, starting from the most primitive communication needs, he opened up a new form of expression for the recruitment platform.

Under the traditional resume-centered search mode, Boss Zhipin has created a new mode of “direct chat + precise matching”, allowing job seekers to have more choices in the recruitment market from a two-dimensional resume world to a three-dimensional world The simple and rude communication methods also greatly reduce the recruitment cost of enterprises.

Under this model, Boss Direct Employment recruits a large number of job seekers and small and medium-sized enterprises. As of June 30, 2022, Boss Direct Employment certified job seekers, certified enterprise end users and certified enterprises reached 100.8 million, 17.2 million and 8.9 million.

With huge traffic in hand, Boss Zhipin started a drastic way to monetize, but it also annoyed some users while making profits.

For nearly a year from July 2021 to June 2022, Boss Zhipin is in the stage of suspending the registration of new users. However, in the first half of this year, Boss Zhipin still bucked the trend and achieved profitability. The price increase strategy behind this is indisputable.

“Now we are recruiting directly at Boss, and we can no longer recruit people without paying.” Liu Ru said that the company wants to recruit basic administrative positions on Boss Direct, but after uploading the information, the system prompts that it is a “competitive position”. A fee is required to publish.

The latest quotation given by Boss Direct Employment is divided into two types, one is the post system, the price of a position is 388 yuan/month, and you can only passively wait for job seekers to “strike up a conversation”; the other is annual payment, the annual fee is 4,800 yuan, which can be published 5 “hot” positions, the number of active communication increased to 200 times.

In addition, props with accurate matching functions such as the excellent direct card, the search chat card, and the excellent bomb divide the paying users into three, six, and nine grades. The B-side, which is more and more refined for paying users, is a “service downgrade” for ordinary users. Ordinary users seem to become the “blind spot” of Boss’s direct employment algorithm, and cannot experience the function of “direct chat + smart matching” at all.

Therefore, on the premise of continuing to develop deep paid membership services, it will become more difficult to keep the number of monthly active users growing.

In addition, Boss Direct Employment, which has always been outstanding for its “smart” algorithm, was pushed into the limelight again due to the lax qualification review of the company.

In August, the erotic recruitment incident that occurred in Boss Zhipin was posted on Weibo, and Boss Zhipin was once ridiculed by netizens as “Boss Zhipin”. The MLM organization was framed to death, and network security has become the security line for the development of Internet companies.

On the other hand, Boss’s next focus is the blue-collar market. At present, the MAU of Boss’s blue-collar users accounts for 30% of the total, and the revenue contribution in the third quarter accounts for 26%. The goal of Boss’s direct employment in the next three years is Get 100 million new users. In this case, more than 2/3 of the users will be the traditional blue-collar users, including urban services, including manufacturing, logistics and other labor-based industries.

This also means that the improvement of algorithm and technical strength is even more urgent, and the stumble that 58 has stumbled cannot be repeated here by Zhao Peng. If there are always loopholes in the qualification review level of the recruitment side, then the blue-collar star sea may not be realized, and the user growth of Boss direct employment will be out of the question.

Of course, we also saw that in the third quarter, the R&D expenses directly hired by Boss were as high as 290 million yuan, and the R&D expense ratio was 24.6%, a year-on-year increase of 7.3%. Founder Zhao Peng said in a public speech that the company will continue to increase investment in job search security and data security in the future. In addition to core technologies such as smart matching, the R&D of Boss Zhipin is mainly used to strengthen data security and risk assessment capabilities.

In September, Boss Zhipin obtained the first “Data Security Management Capability Certification (DSMC)” certificate issued by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. In addition to being approved by the regulatory authorities, Boss Direct Employment has also made significant progress.

The announcement shows that in the second quarter of 2022, the Boss Direct Employment Platform disposed of 208,000 accounts of illegal recruiters. After the implementation of the governance of industries with concentrated flexible employment groups, the number of related reports dropped by 16% from the previous month.

According to historical development experience, the first battlefield of economic recovery will be the labor supply market. The improvement of urbanization, the economic development is faster than the development of the labor market, and the penetration rate of China’s human resources market has room for further improvement, coupled with the economic recovery in the post-epidemic era, all of which are good for the future development of Boss Direct Employment.

However, how to maintain a good reputation and maintain the current development momentum will be the most important issue for Boss Direct Employment.