Second, Chitu was a rare (and possibly the only) example of an app from LinkedIn built specifically to target one non-English market \u2014 and a very big one at that \u2014 by building a social graph independent of LinkedIn\u2019s. Chitu\u2019s shutdown is therefore a sign of how LinkedIn ultimately didn\u2019t succeed in that effort.<\/p>\n
The company posted an announcement<\/a> of the change in Chinese on Chitu\u2019s website, and a spokesperson for LinkedIn confirmed the changes further in a statement provided to TechCrunch, where it described Chitu \u2014 which has been around since 2015 \u2014 as \u201cone of many experiments.\u201d<\/p>\n It also noted that it will be upgrading the LinkedIn core app as a \u201cone-stop shop\u201d, incorporating some of Chitu\u2019s features, presumably in an effort to attract Chitu\u2019s users rather than lose them altogether.<\/p>\n \u201cChitu will officially go offline at the end of July 2019,\u201d the company noted in the statement. \u201cIn the future, we will focus on the continuous optimization and upgrade of the LinkedIn app, serving as a one-stop shop to accompany Chinese professionals along each step of their career development and connect to more opportunities.\u201d We\u2019ll post the full statement LinkedIn sent us at the bottom of this article.<\/p>\n LinkedIn first officially set up shop in China back in 2014<\/a>\u00a0as \u201c\u9886\u82f1\u201d. Its branding firm pointed out at the time<\/a>\u00a0that the characters\u2019 pronunciation, \u201cling ying,\u201d sounding a bit like \u201cLinkedIn\u201d and loosely meant \u201cto lead elites.\u201d It was initially established as a joint venture with Sequoia and CBC since it was still an independent company and not owned by Microsoft at the time.<\/p>\n LinkedIn already had users in the country at that point \u2014 some 4 million individuals and 80,000 companies were already using the English-language version of the site at the time \u2014 but the idea was to set up a local operation to seize the opportunity of creating services more tailored to the world\u2019s biggest mobile market, which would include local language support, and to meet the regulatory demands of needing to establish local operations to do that. It included efforts to build integrations with other sites like WeChat, as well as bigger partnerships with the likes of Didi<\/a>.<\/p>\n The idea was to build a new app that could tap into the smartphone craze that had swept the country, in particular among younger users who had foregone using computers in favor of their hand-held devices that they used to regularly check in on apps like WeChat.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the past year, we have done a lot of localization efforts and achieved great results, such as deep integration with WeChat, Weibo, QQ mailbox, and Alibaba,\u201d he wrote in an essay at the time (originally in Chinese).<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, in general, we are still maintaining a global platform that is note evolving fast enough, and localization is not determined. We believe that only a product that is independent of the global platform can fully meet the unique needs of social networking in China, so that we can really run like a startup.\u201d<\/p>\n LinkedIn would at the same time continue to build out the Chinese version of LinkedIn itself targeting older and more premium users who might be interacting with people in other languages like English.<\/p>\n From what we understand,\u00a0Chitu had a good start, with millions of users signing up in the early years, beating LinkedIn itself on user retention rates and engagement.<\/p>\n But a source says that internally it faced some issues for trying to develop an ecosystem independent of the LinkedIn platform, which only became more challenging after Microsoft acquired the company, the source said. (He didn\u2019t say why, but for starters it would have been more lucrative to monetise a single user base, and to develop new features for a single platform, rather than do either across multiple apps.)<\/p>\n \u201cAfter Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, independence became unthinkable,\u201d the source said. \u201cPeople with entrepreneurial DNA have all left, so it\u2019s natural to shut down Chitu at this point.\u201d It didn\u2019t help that Shen himself left the company in 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wordpressdynamos.com\/timesofnewscdn\/blog\/0c147_Image-from-iOS-2.png?resize=382%2C680&ssl=1\")
A year later, Derek Shen, the LinkedIn executive who led the launch of LinkedIn China, spearheaded the launch of Chitu<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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More generally, and likely to better compete against local players, LinkedIn tells us that it\u2019s rebooted its growth strategy in the country last month. That new strategy appears to be based fundamentally on any new services or partnerships now stemming from one centralised platform.<\/p>\n