REUTERS – Professional social network LinkedIn Corp (LNKD.N) beat Wall Street’s third-quarter profit and revenue targets on Thursday and raised its full-year revenue forecast.
Shares of LinkedIn were up 6.2 percent at $113.52 in after-hours trading.
LinkedIn said it posted net income of $2.3 million, or 2 cents a share, during the three months ended September 30, compared with a net loss of $1.6 million, or 2 cents a share, in the year-ago period.
Excluding certain items, LinkedIn said it earned 22 cents a share in the third quarter, above the 11 cents expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Revenue in the third quarter was $252 million, up 81 percent year-over-year and ahead of the average analyst expectation of $244.2 million.
LinkedIn said it now expects total revenue for 2012 to range between $939 million and $944 million, compared with its prior range of $915 million to $925 million.
LinkedIn, which has 175 million members, connects professionals seeking jobs and companies looking for employees. The company makes money from selling ads and premium subscriptions, as well as from offering specialized services to recruiters, setting it apart from its ad-dependent social networking rivals such as Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Twitter.
The Mountain View, California-based company said that revenue from its job-recruiter services increased 95 percent year-on-year in the third quarter, while advertising revenue increased 60 percent.
LinkedIn also said that traffic to its homepage increased 60 percent since a website redesign that it rolled out during the third quarter.
Shares of LinkedIn, which closed Thursday’s regular session at $106.85, have fallen 15 percent since mid-September but are up roughly 70 percent in 2012.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; editing by Matthew Lewis; editing by Gunna Dickson)
