Irish arm of Linkedin to return $5.6bn to parent Microsoft Ireland Research

The Irish arm of jobs and professional networking social media platform LinkedIn intends to return capital of $5.6 billion (€5.6 billion) to its immediate parent firm, Microsoft Ireland Research, according to to its latest accounts. The company last year paid out a dividend of €250 million.

Pretax profits increased by 42 per cent to $176.35 million last year, the accounts said.

LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company recorded the jump in pretax profits as revenues surged by $1.38 billion or 42.5 per cent from $3.24 billion to $4.62 billion.

LinkedIn employs over 2,000 staff in Ireland and is currently limiting hiring. It has not made any redundancies here.

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The note states that revenues last year increased by $1.38 billion “due to increases across all lines of business”.

Last month, LinkedIn Ireland confirmed to RTÉ that it was scaling back plans to expand its office space at a new campus in Dublin due to more of its Irish staff working from home.

Commercial real estate developer Iput is currently developing 600,000sq ft of new office space at Wilton Park and the firm has decided not to occupy space at Two and Three Wilton. It will only require space in One Wilton and subsequently inFour Wilton when the project is completed around 2025.

The Irish-based business of LinkedIn manages the company’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The revenues generated by the Irish-based business accounted for 45 per cent of LinkedIn’s global revenues of $10.28 billion in 2021.

The accounts show the average numbers employed by LinkedIn last year declined marginally from 1,810 to 1,787 but staff costs increased from $288.27 million to $294.2 million.

The accounts note, however, that there was “an increase in the actual number of employees during the latter half of the financial year supporting the company’s growth in activities during the year”.

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Today, LinkedIn employs over 2,000 staff in Ireland and is limiting hiring in line with the current business environment and has not made any redundancies here.

The business last year recorded post-tax profits of $155.28 million after paying corporation tax of €21 million.

The accounts said the number of members last year increased by 70 million to 810 million across 200 countries in 26 languages.

“This was achieved through continued investment on the LinkedIn platform and in marketing and advertising expenses.”

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The company’s cost of sales last year increased by 52 per cent from $1.8 billion to $2.74 billion and administrative expenses increased by 26 per cent from $1.35 billion to $1.7 billion while “other operating expenses” totalled $13.92 million.

The firm last year recorded an operating profit of $161.88 million and profits were boosted by $13.79 million received in shares from group subsidiaries.

At the end of December last, the business had shareholder funds of $6.18 billion with the bulk of funds made up of $4.19 billion from a share premium account.

The firm’s cash funds last year increased from $7 million to $8.9 million.

The company has subsidiaries based in 17 countries – Britain, Canada, India, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan, Germany, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, Brazil, Austria, Malaysia and Mexico.