LinkedIn is thinking of a regional language support on its platform as the operator of the world’s largest online network for professionals crossed 50 million user base in India, its second largest market outside of the United States and the largest market in the Asia-Pacific region.

Speaking on the milestone, Akshay Kothari, India head for LinkedIn said, “India is the first market outside of the US to hit the 50 million user mark, we have doubled our user base in the last 4 years and we are adding a million users every 6 weeks or so and a lot of this growth that we are seeing in India is coming from the tier 2-3 cities”.

As LinkedIn deepens its focus to in making blue -collared jobs more available, Kothari said that regional language support on the platform has become imperative.

"It's something that we constantly discuss internally because for the knowledge workers the current English product works really well, but as we go more to the blue collar economy in India .. we are increasing getting feedback to be wanting to be in other languages , so that is something that we are strongly considering now."

After having launched in India in 2009 with a user base of 3.4 million, the company grew 3 fold to cross 10 million mark in the next 3 years.

The company launched its lightweight mobile website in September 2016 followed by the launch of ‘LinkedIn Lite’ Android app in July 2017 to tap into the growing smartphone market in the country . Both were developed at the R&D centre in Bengaluru, the first outside of its Mountain View-California headquarters.

LinkedIn's growth has doubled in India from last year, with revenues coming from the talent solutions business and the consumer or the subscription services, which are also the fastest growing businesses of the firm.

Kothari believes that price points for subscription business is not really an issue.

"Over the last one year, we have been experimenting a lot with the pricing , what we have now as the learnings from the experiment, that it has been its less pricing driven and more value driven . .. our general focus is around how do we provide more value and based on our growth rates , it looks like people are really hungry actually get those subscription products."

First Published:Jul 17, 2018 7:57 AM IST