Morgan Stanley has been mandated by Superjob.ru, a leading online recruitment platform with 3.2 million unique users monthly, to find a potential acquirer of a minority stake, Russian business daily Kommersant reported yesterday. “We would offer a minority stake to a partner whose good name on the NASDAQ could help us go public successfully,” Kommersant quoted Superjob CEO Alexey Zakharov as saying.
Superjob is a profitable company and has thus far never needed investor money, Zakharov underlined. In an IPO, the founders will sell only a “minimum” quantity of shares.
Zakharov and his partner Sergey Gabestro co-founded Superjob.ru in 2000 before investing $1.5 million in a recruitment agency they launched one year later, Kommesant reported. Now Superjob.ru stands as Russia’s third largest online recruitment service in terms of audience, just after RDW.ru and HH.ru, the latter controlled by Mail.ru Group.
More than 550,000 companies are registered at Superjob.ru. Something over 20,000 of these are paid subscribers who generate the better part of the site’s revenues. In 2011 Superjob doubled its EBITDA to $25 million, according to an unnamed source cited by Kommersant. Zakharov did not comment on this figure, but indicated that Superjob’s revenues grow up more than twofold each year.
In the case of an IPO, Superjob’s valuation could amount to some $1.5 billion, claimed Kommersant’s source. But Zakharov hopes for a figure closer to $3 billion after the company grows significantly in a middle or long term perspective, he told East-West Digital News.
The capitalization of Yandex and Mail.ru, the only Russian Internet companies listed on Western stock exchanges, amounts to $5.6 billion and $6.5 billion respectively on the NASDAQ and the LSE.
