As we reported today, Burda Digital GmbH has purchased 25.1% of XING AG shares. By purchasing these shares from Cinco Capital GmbH, the holding company of our Founder Lars Hinrichs, the subsidiary of Burda Media has become the main shareholder of XING (read the press release here).

I’m very excited about this participation and the future cooperation with Burda. It’s a match made in heaven: Burda Media as the leading European media group and XING as the leading European business network. In recent years, the group has invested in the Internet continually, and is active online and offline with its own products and publications (CHIP, Focus, etc.) as well as participations (Tomorrow Focus, Glam Media, Zooplus). In doing so, Burda has proven itself to be a long-term and internationally oriented investor.

We still have a lot of plans on continuing to develop and grow XING. In this process, it’s great to have a strong partner such as Burda to support us.

This year, Oliver Williamson, who teaches at UC Berkeley, was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (he shared the prize with Elinor Ostrom).

Admittedly, the official explanation by the Nobel Committee is hard for a layman to understand. He is being honored “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm”.

You also may be wondering what all of this has to do with XING. Quite frankly, a lot. Oliver Williamson is particularly famous for his concept of “transaction costs”, meaning costs associated with doing business with suppliers. These include costs for searching for the right partner, costs for making the initial contact, negotiation expenses, and also costs connected with a contract signing. (more…)

I have spoken on various occasions over the last few weeks about our areas of focus and our targets as a company. Just by way of a reminder: our absolute key goal is to create added value for our members – by providing them with new features and applications that help them to work and network even more effectively using XING. We’re making fast progress here, having launched a more than steady stream of new features over recent weeks: from Company Profiles to the “Members you may know” feed, and the first OpenSocial apps “Ask XING” and “XING News”. We’ve stepped up our rate of innovation considerably – and look forward to receiving feedback from as many of you as possible. But that was just the beginning! We’re continuing our innovation offensive and I look forward being able to tell you more about it very soon – with regular posts in our blog. (more…)

43% higher revenue and 29% higher EBITDA in comparison to last year’s Q1: we can be proud of the quarterly results we’ve just published. Even in the midst of a global financial crisis, XING continues to grow very profitably. We’ve strengthened our market position, while at the same time making strategic decisions for future growth. I’d like to give my deepest thanks to all our employees for their hard work in recent months.

I’m especially happy that we’ve really stepped up our speed of innovation. We introduced a new feed on the home page – “Members you may know” – which has been very popular with members. Now with the successful launch of OpenSocial applications, we’ve laid the technical foundation for providing our members with relevant features developed by third-party developers. By doing so, we’ve started setting our strategic course for increasing the viral growth of our community in order to ensure profitable growth in the future. (more…)

Today we published our detailed results for the past financial year. 2008 was an extremely successful 12 months for us – a year which saw our revenues increase by 80% to 35 million euros ($48.5 million), generating a profit in excess of 7 million euros ($9.7 million). This is something the whole team here at XING can be extremely proud of! For all details please refer to the full press release and our 2008 Annual Report – also have a look at Reuters reporting about us.

I’ve been at XING for a good two months now. The busy last few weeks have flown by and I have had the opportunity to gain a much deeper insight into the factors that make XING so successful. I have spent most of this time getting to know my colleagues, talking directly to members, immersing myself in all aspects of our business and setting out clear areas of focus for the upcoming quarters together with my team. (more…)

If you have missed him live at CeBIT on Wednesday: Here you can watch Stefan Groß-Selbeck’s keynote speech about “Business Networking @ XING” on video.

Today is my first day as the new CEO of XING AG and I therefore wanted to take some moments to briefly introduce myself here on our Blog as well. I’m 41 years young, married and have two children. I arrive at XING from eBay, where I’ve held various different positions since 2002. For the past four years I have overseen business operations as General Manager of eBay Deutschland.
Since my appointment was announced several weeks ago, I have been overwhelmed with the kind and positive words I’ve received from so many people. This news was also accompanied by a pleasing side effect: I have more than tripled my number of personal contacts literally overnight. I couldn’t have wished for a better reception and I already feel very much at home after such a warm welcome.

It has long been clear to me, as a member in the past, what it is that makes XING different from similar platforms: Our members form a business community that really is uniquely active. They bring new momentum to professional networking on a daily basis with their many thousands of events, group postings and messages. A central task of mine as the new CEO will be to further develop and expand this unique community. Now I have finally started and I’m very much looking forward to getting to know all of my new colleagues in person. Lars Hinrichs has built up something with his team here in Hamburg that enjoys the utmost respect throughout the global Internet sector. Back in 2003 when almost all online businesses were teetering at crisis point and dozens of ambitious plans had failed, he came up with a new business idea and launched it online just a few weeks later. This alone is testimony to his entrepreneurial spirit and enterprise, more than ably assisted by his enthusiastic team.

The last five years have seen this start-up evolve into a highly successful and globally operational company. We already employ 192 employees in Hamburg, Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing at present, and all the signs indicate that there is ample potential for further growth – especially in view of the current economic climate.
This places us in a very promising position and, for me, the exciting challenge now lies ahead of making our community the most active worldwide in more and more regions around the globe together with the whole team. We intend to drive the expansion of the platform further forward, integrating new features and functionality along the way. I am, of course, also reliant on your support in our endeavors to make XING even more valuable to you as members. I therefore welcome all your feedback – both positive and negative. I’m extremely keen to ensure a direct exchange with you, and for an online community like ours a Blog is of course a very fitting way to achieve this. I will be keeping you continually updated here on all the latest developments at XING, along with the rest of our 6.5 million plus members based in more than 200 different countries and not forgetting our shareholders. Please therefore stop by here regularly to catch up on our news, or simply subscribe to the RSS feed for the Blog.

As well as my regular posts here in this CEO Corner, I also look forward to communicating with members and reading their posts both in the XING Group and the Moderation Group. I reserve particular respect for the 34,000 moderators who have demonstrated such sterling self-initiative in building up more than 21,000 wonderful groups on the platform. My colleagues in the Community Management department will continue to moderate the group on an active and daily basis. Your input and feedback is nevertheless of great interest to me and I will be sure to keep you informed on particularly important issues.

It´s a deal! We’ve just announced the purchase of NY-based socialmedian Inc., a leading innovator in the online news industry. For XING it´s a huge technological jump as it enables the integration of business news into our network.

Why do we think that socialmedian is a perfect fit for XING? Here´s why: In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.

Jason Goldberg, new VP XING Applications Platform

Thanks to socialmedian you can save the little time you have. Socialmedian gathers information from about 19,000 sources, including social media services such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader and many, many more. Socialmedian then filters your news through your social networking contacts. That means you get the news you´re looking for, the news that fit your interests and your passions. And it doesn´t stop there: Due to it´s intelligent custom filter technology socialmedian isn´t just for the individual member. Just think of all the ways it can help boost business for your groups, your events as well as for the company you work for.

On top of this great news Jason Goldberg, socialmedian´s founder and CEO, is going to join us at our headquarters in Hamburg. Jason is a pioneer in the Internet business, he founded the career development website Jobster in 2004 and headed the company as CEO. Now in his new role of VP XING Applications Platform Jason will be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with our XING network.

We cannot wait for Jason to join our team and see how the innovative socialmedian technology becomes an integral part of XING! A big thanks to the deal team: Burkhard, Jackson, Johannes & Julian and everybody else who supported in this process.

After five exciting and successful years, I’ve decided to dedicate more of my time outside of my commitment to XING to new entrepreneurial challenges.

The company has long since grown from a startup to one of the leading players in social networking worldwide. We were successful from the beginning, despite the voices of the critics. In 2003, we kept going and listened to those who relied on us to help more effectively manage their professional lives, and who continue to do so after five years. Working together in recent years, we have created structures to maintain the scalable and profitable growth.

By appointing Stefan as my successor (he currently heads eBay Germany), I’ve found a very successful and extremely Internet-savvy manager to lead XING. Now I’m able to concentrate once again on that which matters to me as an entrepreneur: developing new ideas and giving them life by means of entrepreneurial spirit. In the future, I will continue to advise XING as a member of the Supervisory Board. I am also the largest shareholder in the company, and intend on remaining so.

I would like to give special thanks to our over 170 hardworking and experienced employees from over 26 countries, many of which have become friends of mine. I’d also like to thank all our members – all of whom have made XING into that which it is today. Without the commitment of all those involved, XING would never have become the European leader for business networking with over 6.5 million members in such a short period of time.

I am certain that XING will continue its rapid development with Stefan, and I’m already looking forward to seeing the moment in which the new features we’ve been developing in the past months are launched one by one on the platform.

Let’s start a new chapter in the history of XING together. You as members can write a piece of Internet history, along with XING, Stefan and his team.

Despite the difficult economic times, XING AG has continuously expanded its growth in the course of the third quarter 2008 yet another record quarter. We’re an example of the opportunities present in every crisis: crisis accelerates change, and this is good.
In these uncertain times, our members rely even more on their professional contacts. If your company lays you off or does cost cutting, you start to see right away how valuable social networks can be. At XING, we concentrate on offering our members a wide range of opportunities and tools for expanding their professional network. In short, we help people increase value particularly in difficult economic periods. Professional networks are not a fad; they’re here to stay. And now is the time to make the most of your network.
Our business model is rather simple: Expanding numbers of members are resulting in higher revenues and contributions to earnings in all three service categories (B2C, B2C and Advertising). This demonstrates that XING is one of the winners of this development. At XING we can realy speak about profits and tax rates we have to pay. Much better feeling than just to speak about higher revenues.

Since the IPO in December 2006, our numbers of our members have risen every quarter, thus driving up our revenues and results. Apart from the growth in revenues, XING AG is one of the small number of listed companies which combine such rapid revenue growth with an above-average profitability (our last quarter was at 40%). In these terms, XING AG is one of the most profitable companies on the German markets.

The unique success and the continuing strong growth of XING are attributable particularly to highly motivated and experienced employees – actually the best team I have ever been privileged to work with. Their commitment is our most sustainably productive capital. And, since the beginning of the year, we have recruited a further 52 employees in order to enable us to continue to successfully implement the growth strategy which we have initiated. We are not laying people off, we haven’t stopped hiring, or even slowing down the recruitment processs. Indeed, the reverse is true: we have over 40 open positions at present. As an entrepreneur I strongly believe that these times are excellent opportunities, and XING is ready to tackle them.
The new employees will help develop new ideas and business models, and provide XING with strong support for the successful implementation of numerous new projects which provide our members with additional added value for business networking.