LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), Seeking To Expand India Reach, Unveils Three New ‘Strategic Initiatives’

LinkedIn announced Monday three new products aimed at expanding its reach in India, the company’s second-largest market globally. The initiatives — LinkedIn Placements, LinkedIn Starter Pack, and LinkedIn Lite — are aimed at “democratizing access to economic opportunity in India,” the company said.

“While LinkedIn has grown multiple folds in India since we started operating here 6 years ago, there’s so much more we want to do here. We are committed to India and to boosting our ability to deliver value to even more members and be a part of their professional growth journey, by investing and innovating locally,” LinkedIn India head Akshay Kothari said at the launch Monday. “These new initiatives help us keep pace with the rising demand for knowledge and access to opportunity.”

LinkedIn Placements, whose pilot launch took place November 2015, seeks to provide a “level playing field” for Indian college and university students through the use of a common online assessment test for openings in 35 companies, both local and international. LinkedIn Starter Pack, meanwhile, aims to connect startups and small and medium-sized businesses in the country to prospective employees.

The third service, LinkedIn Lite, is a stripped down version of the social networking website.

“LinkedIn Lite loads four times faster, regardless of the mobile device and the network it is connected to, providing a fast, seamless experience to all its features and unlocking a lot of value for people in urban as well as rural areas. This product has started ramping and will be available to all Indian members in the next few weeks,” LinkedIn said in a press release.

India currently accounts for the world’s second-largest internet user base. Despite this, however, the country occupies the 114th position for average connection speed globally, according to the latest State of the Internet report by Akamai Technologies, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, cloud services provider.

LinkedIn, which recently opened its largest office in Asia in the Indian city of Bangalore, currently has over 37 million users in India — roughly 10 percent of the its global user base.