Viadeo, a global professional social network with over 40 million members, and Sanoma Independent Media (SIM), Russia’s leading glossy magazine publisher, announced yesterday a joint venture agreement to develop Viadeo’s network in Russia.
The deal will combine the local strengths of SIM asset Rb.ru, one of Russia’s top business websites with a powerful professional community and Viadeo social networking tech expertise. Viadeo has also announced its platform will be available in Cyrillic, including local services, at the beginning of next year.
With its head office in Paris, Viadeo has expanded to a range of national markets throughout the world, from the UK to the US, Spain and Italy. The company has focused strongly on emerging markets, with a presence in China, India, Mexico and Senegal.
“Our new Russian office and this joint venture with Sanoma Independent Media open up the door to Russia and its huge growth potential for the professional social network industry. Looking at our multi-local strategy in the emerging countries, Russia was the missing part. With this partnership, our BRIC puzzle is complete,” said Dan Serfaty, founder and CEO of Viadeo.
Growing competition
Embryonic just one year ago, the Russian online professional social networking market has seen important moves from domestic and international players in recent months. In May, Professionali.ru, a site founded in 2008, raised $2.5 million from Open Capital, a London based venture capital fund investing in Russia and other former Soviet states.
In July, LinkedIn launched a Russian version of its website along with Romanian and Turkish versions. At the time, according to the company, the English version of the website already had 400,000 users from Russia and over 1,000 groups related to Russia.
The leading player on the market, however, remains MoiKrug.ru, a property of Russian search giant Yandex, with almost 2 million unique users aged between 12 and 54 in October 2011, according to TNS Russia. Professionali.ru counted just 543,000 unique users that same month.
A nationwide poll released in July by SuperJob.ru, the leading Russian language employment search provider in Russia and the CIS, indicated that just 28% of Russian Internet users were registered with a professional social network. 11% of the respondents declared to have an account on MoiKrug, 9% had one on Professionali.ru, but just 3% were registered users of LinkedIn. Another 10% participated in smaller, more specialized networks, including E-xecutive.ru, Kadrovik.ru, Ingener.info and Doktornarabote.ru.
72% of the respondents said they had no account in any of the above mentioned professional networks and that they didn’t care to know about such networks.
