LinkedIn, the favored enterprise social networking platform owned by Microsoft, will discontinue its China-specific jobs app InCareer and lay off 716 workers worldwide, the corporate stated in a message to workers.

The transfer, introduced Monday, will influence round 3.5% of LinkedIn’s roughly 19,000 workers worldwide. LinkedIn launched InCareer in Dec. 2021 after sunsetting its localized LinkedIn product in China.

“Although InCareer skilled some success prior to now yr because of our sturdy China-based group, it additionally encountered fierce competitors and a difficult macroeconomic local weather,” LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky stated within the message.

Shares of dad or mum firm Microsoft had been largely flat in pre-market buying and selling Tuesday morning. Within the third quarter of 2023, LinkedIn income grew 8% year-over-year to $3.7 billion, in accordance with Microsoft’s earnings report and quarterly SEC submitting.

InCareer will delete all person knowledge by Aug. 9, in accordance with a LinkedIn assist web page.

LinkedIn will proceed to function different companies in China, together with its LinkedIn Studying product. However Roslansky signaled that the corporate would proceed to “handle bills” within the yr forward, suggesting that additional value cuts or layoffs could possibly be on the desk.

China is a fertile marketplace for U.S.-based tech corporations, which regularly jostle with homegrown rivals to seize market share. The whole variety of InCareer and LinkedIn customers in China was over 57 million, in accordance with an InCareer web page. By comparability, home competitor Zhaopin claimed over 320 million skilled customers and company customers starting from Baidu to Chinese language authorities businesses.