LinkedIn stock soared past analyst expectations on Friday, despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial, Nasdaq Composite, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock indexes dropped.
Along with LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), Southwestern Energy Co. (SWN) and American International Group Inc. (AIG) posted gains, and were the most actively traded shares of the day.
LinkedIn also revealed that the company plans to purchase SlideShare, a presentation service, in a cash-and-stock deal, which is valued around $118.8 million. This will continue the site’s expansion after its first-quarter profit surge.
LinkedIn stock is currently up 8 percent to $118.13, a good sign for the professional-networking site, who is now one of the world’s largest social networks. They have 161 million registered users, and include recruiting services, advertising, and paid memberships.
In its first quarter, the networking company doubled sales to $188.5 million, which was well above the Wall Street consensus of $178.4 million. They also posted a huge profit gain of $5 million (about 4 cents per share), up from the 2011 first quarter profit of $2.08 million (or zero cents per share).
This provides a very positive out for the company, who, when compared to other social media sites like Groupon and Zynga, who have reported steady declines in the past months. Of course, the biggest social networking site in the world, Facebook, has posted much larger profits in comparison, and according to their IPO reports , they are also pulling in a much bigger profit than the business-networking site.
Analysts predict that LinkedIn will continue to be a good stock worth investing in, despite the rocky figures of other stocks in the social media “sector” of the marked. It is also expected that Facebook will continue to see rising success in the market when it goes public on May 18th.
As for LinkedIn, the company is expected to continue posting profit gains in the coming months.