Hong Kong based Recruit.net, a job search engine we first wrote about in May, is expanding, and they’re still not interested in the United States.
Recruit.net aggregates job listings from partner sites for its main portal and also provides syndicated results for other sites, a model that sees the Recruit.net bringing in increasing revenues in a hyper-competitive vertical.
Recruit.net launched into Malaysia in September and will launch a New Zealand portal this week. Coming soon are sites for Vietnam and the Philippines in the first quarter of 2008. The company already provides sites for Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.
It’s an interesting corporate strategy, not only from the tech/revenue viewpoint but from the complete lack of desire to enter the US market (I understand it, but others with a US focus may not). Recruit.net’s Maneck Mohan told me that the company sees a growing internationalization of web services, and that their focus on Asia is timely given the growing economic power of the region at a time when the US economy is in trouble. Countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines still have relatively low internet penetration levels (20% and 16% respectively) but this is changing as more people come online as both see a growing middle class. Even Malaysia, long considered to be one of the more prosperous South East Asian countries has only recently passed 50% internet penetration (52% currently) out of a population of 28 million; Vietnam and the Philippines have populations of 85 million and 87 million people. As Mohan said to me in an email: “why enter a crowded market like the US and compete with existing players, when white hot emerging markets like Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam are wide open and under serviced?”