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LinkedIn Financials
LinkedIn saw an increase in its revenue after its acquisition by Microsoft. The breakdown of the company's financials has been presented on the attached spreadsheet.
Before its acquisition by Microsoft in 2016, LinkedIn had a valuation of $26 billion and generated $2.99 billion in revenue, after it was acquired it generated a revenue of $5.259 billion. The company had 413.7 million registered users before it was acquired then saw an increase to 575 million in 2018.
LinkedIn revenue after it was acquired, primarily consisted of revenue generated from Talent Solutions products.
Revenue by Product before acquisition
Talent solutions (Hiring and learning and development) consist 63% of the total revenues by products compared to 19% by Marketing solutions and 18% by Premium subscriptions.
- Hiring: $1.77 billion
- Learning and development: $107.42 million
- Marketing solutions: 581.3 million
- Premium subscriptions: $532.4 million
Research methodology
In order to find the pre-acquisition and post-acquisition financials of LinkedIn, we began by searching for the last annual reports, investor relations and SEC filings by LinkedIn before its acquisition by Microsoft. This proved productive as we were able to find the last published financials by the company just before it was acquired. The financials were published in 2016 for the FY 2015 and was the last financial report by LinkedIn as an independent company.
After finding the financial information of the company before its acquisition, next was to search for its financials after the acquisition. We combed through the annual reports published by the company, unfortunately, there was no further report by the company as it became a part of Microsoft. A search was then carried out on Microsoft annual reports and investor relations and using the latest published report dated 2018, we were able to find LinkedIn financial information but the information presented was only limited to the revenue, operating expenses, cost of revenue, sales and marketing, general and administrative financials and the number of users of LinkedIn. The lack of further breakdown of the financials and operations of the company was due to the reason that LinkedIn has been included in the consolidated results of operations of Microsoft since the date of its acquisition, thereby providing a breakdown of its other financials and valuation after acquisition not possible.
Next, we searched through databases such as annualreports.com, Crunchbase, Datafox, SEC etc. for any information on the breakdown of the Linkedin's financials. Although we were able to find an estimated revenue of the company on databases such as Hoovers, there was no available information on the breakdown of the financials as already stated above, the whole financial operations of LinkedIn has been included in the consolidated results of Microsoft operations.
Thereafter, a search was carried out on media sites such as Forbes, Recode, Wire, CNN etc. This again didn't provide us with the required information although, we were able to find useful information on the company's operations there was no information on the breakdown of the operations of the company and it's valuation after the acquisition.
On the conclusion of the research, we have provided information on LinkedIn's financials just before it was acquired by Microsoft and after acquisition. There wasn't much financial information provided for LinkedIn after its acquisition and its valuation cannot be determined as the company has become a part of Microsoft and all its financial information has been included in the consolidated results of operations of Microsoft and Li