A sleeping giant in Asia’s online jobs space is waking up

When Peter Bithos joined Seek Asia as chief executive in August 2020, the company – which operates online portals JobsDB and JobStreet in the region – was already one of the top players in the recruitment sector. However, he thinks that it has done nothing dramatic in many years.

“I came [in] to transform these portfolios: to take the old dot-com [company] and turn it into a digital platform that will be used by all people in Southeast Asia every day,” he tells Tech in Asia.

Seek Asia CEO Peter Bithos / Photo credit: Seek

Bithos, the ex-CEO of defunct streaming platform Hooq, explains that his first six months at Seek Asia were spent on resetting the strategy for the next five years and reorganizing its leadership structure. He started to look for people with experience in Southeast Asia’s digital ecosystem and expanded the presence and branding of Seek Asia’s job portals.

The company today announced its expansion to South Korea through a US$48 million investment in JobKorea, the country’s largest online employment platform. After the transaction, Seek Asia will own a 10% stake while the rest are held by private equity firm Affinity Equity Partners, which acquired JobKorea in May.

Bithos, who will also join JobKorea’s board, says that despite Seek Asia’s lower stake, it plans to stay in South Korea for the long term, and the investment is a sign of its commitment.

“In the next three years, we want to grow the countries that we have, because there is more than enough growth in this region. But there is a possibility to add more countries after that,” Bithos says.

Focus on Indonesia

Seek Asia is part of Seek, an Australia-based technology group which has an over A$10 billion (around US$7.2 billion) market cap in Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). The group has stakes in Zhaopin, one of China’s top job marketplaces, and education tech firms such as Coursera and FutureLearn. In 2014, Seek acquired Jobstreet and JobsDB and put them under its Asian operations.

Bithos admits many people don’t know about Seek Asia or even Seek, despite the popularity of its portfolios. “I joined partly because it’s a great company that no one knows.”

Based on its latest financial report, Seek Asia has 29 million candidate profiles. On average, there are 160,000 job ads every month from around 105,000 unique recruiters. Its platforms also attract 40 million monthly visits every month.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Seek Asia’s revenue dropped to A$67.1 million (around US$48.4 million) in the second half of 2020 from A$91.3 million (around US$65.8 million) during the same period in 2019. However, the company believes that it will recover as the global crisis dies down.

Seek Asia’s office / Photo credit: SLA Group

He says that Seek Asia will focus on Indonesia. Even though JobStreet is the leading job portal in the archipelago, which has a population of nearly 277 million, it has contributed the least to Seek Asia’s overall revenue so far.

Unifying the legacy