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Jiayuan Grow By 25% As Buyout Offer Is Increased

jiayuan

Chinese online dating company Jiayuan, who are still weighing up a buyout offer, have released their first 2015 financial results, as the offer to buy the company is raised.

The dating company is seeing a continued growth in 2015 – with net revenues up 26.1% year over year, hitting $27.3m.

Their operating losses were also down in Q1 2015, falling from $3.3m to $2.5m.

Jiayuan said this revenue increase was in part due to the rapid expansion of their personalised, premium, matchmaking services.

The CEO of Jiayuan, Linguang Wu, said this part of the business increased by a huge 179% year-over-year.

He said: “The Chinese New Year holiday fell later than usual during the quarter which temporarily affected online user numbers and revenue generation, particularly in online services. The traction of our mobile products remains strong, accounting for 67% of all logins. Qiuai.com in particular is performing well, and is expected to contribute to our bottom line starting next quarter.”

The company’s matchmaking service has offset a total fall in users of Jiayuan.

In the corresponding period of 2014, Jiayuan had 5.39m monthly user accounts, but in 2015 this number fell to 5.15m.

However regarding paying subscribers, Jiayuan’s user base did increase slightly, from 1.45m in 2014 to 1.49m in 2015.

And today, Jiayuan announced that the company seeking to buyout the remaining shares of the business, Vast Profit, have increased their offer.

Vast Profit has said they will increase their price per share from $3.58, or $5.37 per American depositary share, to $4.80, or $7.20 per ADS.

This is after Boston-based investment firm Heng Ren said their initial offer “substantially undervalues” the company, and should be raised by 119%.

The firm believe the stock is worth $11.74 per share, rather than $5.37.

Caymen Islands-based group Vast Profit has already privately agreed to buy 8,003,763 ordinary shares — 19.6% of the company’s total outstanding shares — from Aprilsky, a subsidiary owned by Pangu Trust, whose settlor is Jiayuan founder Haiyan (Rose) Gong.

With this purchase on 2nd March, the company announced that Ms Gong has resigned as director of the company, and will no longer hold the position of co-chairman of the board.

Read Jiayuan’s full 2015 results here.

Simon Edmunds

Simon is the former editor of Global Dating Insights. Born in Newcastle, he has an English degree from Queen Mary, London and after working for the NHS, trained as a journalist with the Press Association. Passionate about music, journalism and Newcastle United.

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