Now Hiring in China

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
March 15, 2007 | Comments (0)

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Human resources specialist 51job (Nasdaq: JOBS) isn't blowing this interview. The company behind the popular 51job Weekly employment classifieds publication announced that it is on pace to earn between $0.15 to $0.17 per ADS before stock-based compensation this quarter. Revenue will punch in between $24.6 million and $25.9 million. Analysts were expecting a profit of $0.12 per ADS on $24.56 million in revenue on average.

The news has favorable implications for China as a whole. If hiring demand is up, that bodes well for corporate profit expectations in the near term. After the past two weeks of rocky trading in Chinese stocks, it comes as welcome validation that the country's fiscal fortitude is holding up better than its share prices.

51job isn't as sophisticated as stateside job listing leaders like Monster Worldwide (Nasdaq: MNST) and Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) HotJobs.com. Sure, 51job publishes employment classifieds on its website and is proficient in executive search like Monster. However, the company's flagship product is the weekly listings of job openings that it sends through 23 localized publications.

That seems to be working just fine for 51job. Even though the country's search leaders -- Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) -- may one day have an online advantage as China grows its base of Internet users, 51job is comfortably ahead at the moment, thanks to its established niche-specific brand.

In other words, that's more than enough to get the job done right -- for now.

Yahoo! has been recommended to Stock Advisor subscribers. Baidu.com is a Rule Breakers newsletter pick. You don't need to look for a job opening to find a 30-day window to try each -- or both -- services for free.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a fan of China's growth story, but he does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has a disclosure policy.

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