Yesterday Moscow-based HeadHunter Group, a leading online job recruitment platform in Russia, raised $220 million on the NASDAQ by offering 16.3 million American Depository Receipts (ADRs) at $13.50, the upper range of the price guidance.
At the close of the first day, HeadHunter Group raised its market capitalization to $787.5 million as the price for its ADRs grew by 17.2% to $15.82 from the initial price, HeadHunter announced on LinkedIn.
HeadHunter Group is now listed on the NASDAQ under the symbol HHR. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, VTB Capital, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Sberbank acted as lead managers on the deal.
The ADRs were sold by HeadHunter Group’s two major shareholders: Highworld Investments fund, which owned 59.99% of the service’s stake, and Goldman Sachs Group’s investment arm ELQ Investors VIII, which held another 40% of its shares.
The world’s third most popular jobs site
HeadHunter operates online in Russia and neighboring countries, providing potential employers and recruiters access to an extensive resume database on a paid basis. The company also provides job seekers and employers with value added services centered around their job seeking and recruitment needs.
According to SimilarWeb, as of January 1, 2019, HeadHunter’s platform was the third most visited job and employment website globally.
From 2016 to 2018, HeadHunter’s resume database grew from 22.1 million to 36.2 million (excluding Ukraine.) Over the same period, the average daily number of job postings on it grew from 344,000 to 559,000 (excluding Ukraine.) According to LiveInternet, its traffic grew from 16.7 million unique visitors per month in 2016 to 20.0 million unique visitors in 2018. The company claims that, as of November 2018, over 86% of its traffic was free (organic) for them.
In 2018, the company’s revenue reached 6.1 billion rubles ($97 million) and its net income increased to 1.03 billion rubles ($16 million at the average exchange rate of that year).
From the early days of the Russian Internet
HeadHunter was founded in 2000 by Russian businessmen Mikhail Frolkin and Yuriy Virovits under the name ‘National Job Club’ (it was renamed into HeadHunter in 2003.) The founders invested about $550,000 in their startup.
In 2007, a 24.5% stake of HeadHunter was acquired by Mail.Ru Group (at that time called Digital Sky Technologies, DST) for $15 million. At the time of purchase, the service’s total worth was estimated at $61.2 million. In 2009, Mail.Ru Group got control of the project and in 2012, it became its sole owner.
In 2016, HeadHunter was sold by Mail.ru Group to a consortium of investors led by Elbrus Capital for about $140 million. Goldman Sachs was said to be among the new shareholders.
In February 2019, HeadHunter acquired a 25% stake in Skillaz, a developer of advanced recruitment solutions valued around $15 million at that time.
Other NASDAQ-listed Russian tech companies include the Internet giant Yandex, telecom operator MTS, telecom company VEON (formerly VimpelCom), and payment service provider QIWI.
