BEIJING, October 14 (TMTPOST)— Microsoft’s professional social network LinkedIn suffered a setback in its localization in China. LinkedIn announced on Thursday a decision to sunset the localized version in China later this year, ending its localization effort since February 2014 in a market where it just halted new signups in March to review compliance with the local law.

In his letter to all the Chinese users, Jian Lu, President of LinkedIn China, explained his company decided to readjust the current strategy and focus more on helping China-based professionals find jobs in local market and companies in the market find desirable candidates. Lu said the company will maintain its commitment to business customers and focus on providing value of “connecting job opportunities”. He expected to launch a series of brand new offerings by the end of the year, no longer releasing users’ original contents or offering features that promote online interaction though.  

While noting the decision was made amid “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements”, LinkedIn senior vice-president Mohak Shroff promised to continue to help Chinese businesses create economic opportunity and unveiled the next step in China: to launch a new app called InJobs later this year. The standalone app will not offer social feed or any feature that enable users to share posts or articles.   

Owning 52 million users, LinkedIn China witnessed a recovery in the local market. Though the COVID-19 pandemic hit the job ads for most of last year, the hiring activity crossed pre-pandemic levels in the last quarter of the year and the active jobs open for recruitment in the past April created a record high, accoding to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. “China was first to lift lockdowns and open the market that eventually led to the increase in hires,” Ajay Thalluri, an analyst at GlobalData commented. He expects that as the domestic economic activity keeps increasing, China will see the employment growth and more hiring activity in the coming quarters.