Yet anoth­er Chi­nese com­pa­ny has filed for a pub­lic offer­ing on the New York Stock Exchange. One of China’s top three job list­ing web­sites, Zhaopin, is just the lat­est in a num­ber of Chi­nese com­pa­nies who are hop­ing to hold US Ini­tial Pub­lic Offer­ings (IPO) lat­er this year, fol­low­ing Aliba­ba, the country’s largest e‑commerce busi­ness and their near­est com­peti­tor, JD.com, as well as Sina Wei­bo, a micro-blog­ging site.

Zhaopin, a bi-lin­gual job board, was set up in 1994 and as of last year the site had 74 mil­lion reg­is­tered users and list­ed more than 10.5 mil­lion job vacan­cies ini­ti­at­ed by 250,000 unique users. At the end of its finan­cial year in June 2013, it record­ed $147 mil­lion in rev­enue, with the major­i­ty com­ing from its online recruit­ment com­pa­ny. It is one of the three most suc­cess­ful job­sites in Chi­na, with its clos­est rivals being 51job and Chi­naHR. With its appli­ca­tion for a US IPO, it hopes to raise close to $100 million.

Com­pe­ti­tion dri­ving the US direction

It is believed that Zhaopin are mak­ing the move into US stock mar­kets because of the intense com­pe­ti­tion they are fac­ing at home. For exam­ple, the pro­fes­sion­al net­work­ing site, LinkedIn, has entered the Chi­nese mar­ket as recent­ly as Feb­ru­ary, hav­ing expe­ri­enced a great deal of inter­est from Chi­nese cit­i­zens in the ten years it has been oper­a­tional. Despite LinkedIn being an Eng­lish-lan­guage site, it has more than four mil­lion reg­is­tered users from Chi­na, span­ning 80,000 inde­pen­dent com­pa­nies. Thanks to China’s huge pop­u­la­tion, LinkedIn is hop­ing to tap into its poten­tial mar­ket of over 140 mil­lion Chi­nese busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als.

Zhaopin also have oth­er up-and-com­ing domes­tic com­pe­ti­tion, as Chi­na has also seen oth­er recruit­ing com­pa­nies enjoy suc­cess by tar­get­ing their ser­vices at spe­cif­ic work­force sec­tors, such as Nei­tui which lists jobs in IT and tech­nol­o­gy, Liepin, tar­get­ing exec­u­tives and RedRen Head­hunt­ing which fea­tures a crowd­sourc­ing recruit­ing app.

Chi­nese stocks back in the game

This proves that there is new shift towards investors putting their mon­ey into Chi­nese stocks on US exchanges. Pre­vi­ous­ly, investors had been shy­ing away from Chi­nese stocks amidst accu­sa­tions dur­ing 2012 by finan­cial reg­u­la­tors of improp­er account­ing hav­ing tak­en place.