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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Tongdao Liepin Group Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Release Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that this conference is recorded.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms. Xueni Wang. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, operator. Hi, everyone. This is IR Director of Liepin, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year results 2020.
I'll remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market operating conditions and relates to events stating both known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance and achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.
Further information regarding risks and other risks, uncertainties and factors are included in the company's filings with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
On today's call, Mr. Rick Dai, company's Chairman and CEO, will pick up with our business operations and highlights. After that, Mr. Ge Tian, company's CFO, will continue with detailed financial review. After the prepared remarks, we will be available to answer your questions.
Now I will turn the call over to Rick.
Okay. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I hope everyone are very well. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call conference call. I am glad to take this opportunity today to share with you Liepin's 2020 review and our rough outlook for the new year.
2020 was not an ordinary year. We observed significant changes in the macroeconomic, the human resource industry and the way our users engage in the recruitment activities. The global pandemic greatly impacted society and everyone's lives and also brought many uncertainties to the global economic. Great opportunities can be found in great challenges. The pandemic has brought a disruptive change to the talent acquisition market, and there has been a remarkable market transformation since then.
The online recruitment penetration rate has reached a historical high on top of the industry's accelerated digital migration trend, the urge for talent and corporate structure upgrade also filled by the pandemic outbreak. In face of these challenges and opportunities, Liepin's business model and ecosystem in talent service industry have proven to be resilient through different economic cycles. While focusing on our core talent recruitment platform, we adopt a more open approach to expand our service coverage on both the business user front and individual user front by continuously exploring and addressing our users' needs.
The service expansion provide us with a stronger growth momentum and put us in a better position to fulfill our mission of helping every talent to achieve greater career success. We are also able to strengthen our relationship with business customers in the course of overcoming that bad moment. We are delighted to see that as we persistently expand our business coverage on the 2B and 2C side, the resilience of our group was greatly improved, leading us to a healthy growth and in the micro economic downturn.
While we are continuously keen on technology called innovation, user experience and fulfilling user needs, we also provide meaningful support in matching the progress of talent development and the progress of corporate strategy upgrade. By the end of 2020, even amid the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, more business users adopt our platforms for diverse service. The number of registered new business users reached 725,000, representing an increase of 29.6% from last year.
2020 was a difficult year to the whole talent service industry. However, we managed to turn the situation around by promoting and applying various online services, as well as granting upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Our ARPU continued to improve in 5 sequential years and hit a historical high at RMB 31,000. Besides business users, our individual users were also accumulating. As of December 31, 2020, our registered individual users is exceeding 63 million in an era where China is transforming from enjoying population dividend to enjoy a talent dividend.
The structural change in talent market is remarkable, particularly the mid- to high-end talent market is growing at a much faster speed than the massive telemarketing and is composed of younger generation. The trends opened up tremendous opportunities for us as a market leader. We initiated our branding campaign in 2020, which helped us serve a wide range of users by targeting more young generations on top of talents with substantial working experience. We are pleased to see that around 30% of newly registered users in 2021 are young population, including entry-level white collar workers and students.
Looking forward, we will continue to expand our user base, enhance our engagements through interactive features and provide more comprehensive service to our users. We maintained healthy growth in our core business during the year and achieved a significant progress in new business initiatives. The recruitment business is Liepin's earliest and the most major profit. It plays a foundation role in Liepin achieving its long-term strategy goals.
In 2020, offline recruitment activities have been largely constrained. The industry states a comeback from the third quarter of 2020 and continued to pick up momentum for the rest of 2020. Liepin as the market-leading player benefiting from the -- our enriched online business and technological innovation, which is the positive year-on-year growth starting from the second quarter and continues to pick up along the year. The recovery result in the past fourth quarter performance with a 47.6% increase in revenue year-on-year, which led at an overall performance of 2020.
Coming to the 2021, based on the rise in the number of new job openings and improved user activities, the momentum in recovery remains strong, and we are very confident in a profitable year.
Looking ahead in 2021 and beyond, as a one-stop talent service plan provider, Liepin will continue to focus on 3 key strategies, which are developing a new -- a well-rounded product mix catering to a wide range of diversified users, insisting on technological innovation and further expanding our HR-related service on 2B and 2C side to embrace the ecosystem.
Firstly, Liepin will continue pursuing excellence in product development. Our superior and diversified product mix will be widely adopted by all kinds of users, including business users ranging from new economic companies, traditional patterns, to even individual recruiters, just because in the various demographics and with different working -- with different work experience will also be fully served. Meanwhile, we are going to strengthen our advantage in technological capability.
Our consistent investment in R&D has built a solid foundation for our advanced matching algorithm and innovative SaaS platform. In an industry where activities are being conducted offline in the traditional manner, we sit in the traditional -- we exist in the industrial transformation by boosting efficiency and leading the digitalization.
Lastly, in the longer term, the team will keep exploring along the talent service value chain by carrying out our vertical population penetration and horizontal business expansion strategies. Both the business users and the individual users will be able to benefit from our mid -- from our mounting streamed business portfolio. Overall, in 2021, the talent services industry will further recover from the economic reforms. We will consistently invest in R&D and enrich our product mix as a one-stop technology and data-driven talent service provider. We continue to believe that China will be an important engine of the global economic and the talent service as a major driver for future development.
In the past 10 years, we optimized the recruitment efficiency by applying data analytics and technology. In the next 10 years, while taking the lead in building a more intellectual talent service industry, we will continue to shoulder social responsibilities, devoting ourselves into establishing a stable and upgrading national-wide employment environment. We firmly believe that our value creation in talent service industry is helping every talent in their career's advance. And we ultimately lead to the success of Chinese companies.
So now let me transfer you to Tian to walk you through our key financial highlights. Thank you.
Thank you, Rick. And thanks, again, everyone, for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2020 results release call. I will go through our financial performance.
We were pleased to have finished 2020 with exceptional business and financial performance in the first quarter. Our revenue was RMB 607.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, a 47.6% increase year-over-year, which was primarily due to the recovery in recruitment and job-seeking sentiment brought by the relaxed restrictions and the rebound of economic conditions. The gross profit was RMB 454.8 million in Q4, a 55% increase year-over-year. For the full year of 2020, our total revenue was RMB 1,869.7 million, an increase of RMB 23.5% from 2019. Approximately 92.2% of our revenue was generated from providing talent acquisition and other HR services to our business users.
We also generated a small portion of our revenue by providing professional career services to individual paying users. The growth in the revenue was primarily driven by the increase in the number of business customers as well as average revenue per user. The number of our business customers increased by 6.3%, which was due to the improvement of online talent service penetration and brand recognition. The ARPU increased by 13.3%, driven by upsell and cross-sell opportunities brought by the high-quality customers' diverse and resilient demand. This is also a good reflection of our high-quality customer base.
Our gross profit was RMB 1,457.1 million in 2020, up by 24.8% year-over-year, and our gross margin increased to 77.9% in 2020, increased by 0.7 points, which credit to the change in product mix as a result of the customers' preference in using online services with higher profit margin and the improvement of our operational efficiency.
Turning to the operating expenses. Our sales and marketing expenses were RMB 848.6 million in 2020. And as a percentage of revenue, it decreased from 47.8% in 2019 to 45.4% in 2020, primarily due to the improving operating leverage driven by the increase in the efficiency of our sales and service team. Our G&A expenses were RMB 320.6 million in 2020, a 29.6% increase year-over-year, which was primarily due to the increase in the management personnel costs driven by the group expansion and the increase in loss allowance as the management were more prudent on the recoverable rate due to the outbreak of the pandemic. Our G&A expenses as a percent of revenue was 70.1% in 2020.
Moving to the R&D. Our R&D expenses were RMB 239.9 million in 2020, 29.5% increase compared to 2019. In order to seize the significant long-term growth opportunities, we invested aggressively in R&D headcount and personnel costs. As a percentage of revenue, our R&D expenses increased from 12.2% in 2019 to 12.8% in 2020, primarily as a result of investment in product innovations, upgrade of existing products and integration of the systems for those newly acquired companies in order to achieve future synergy. Other income primarily comprised of income derived from interest income from bank deposits. Our other income decreased by 18.6%, hitting RMB 97.9 million in 2020, primarily as a result of the decrease in the interest income from bank deposits due to the cash settlement from the M&A activities and also the decrease of the interest rate, as you may know. Also, our fair value changes of other financial assets is another reason.
As a result, our profit from operation in 2020 was RMB 145.8 million, a 10.6% improvement on a yearly basis. Our non-GAAP operating profit, excluding share-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets resulting from acquisition, was RMB 248.6 million in 2020, a 33.9% increase from 2019.
And lastly, turning to our cash flow. In 2020, our net cash generated from operating activities reached RMB 466 million, an 87% increase year-over-year. Our cash generation capability remained quite strong during the economic downturns. And our contractual liabilities was RMB 850 million, 25.4% increase year-over-year as well, which is mainly attributed the growth of the business and cash advance from our business customers. So overall, we capped off this challenging year with a remarkable business and financial performance.
Our business model and financial structure were being tested and proven to be resilient. As we have gone through the tough 2020 and have been well prepared with our products and operations, we are expecting a much more healthy and further improving business and financial performance in 2021 and forward.
Now I will turn the call back to the operator to begin the Q&A.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Melody Chan.
I have 2 questions. First, I know that we will be focusing more on the user segmentation. So I guess it will be beneficial for our ARPU. So how should we see the ARPU trend in the future? And my second question is about our acquisition of Xiopin Are we seeing any synergy from the acquisition now or when should we expect to see? And do we have an expectation on the profitability time line of Xiopin ?
Sure. I'll take the questions first and later, Rick might add some comments. So regarding the ARPU, I think the key to improve ARPU is to have multiple products for the customers to upsell or cross-sell. And our paying business customers increased to 55,000 in 2020, and our pay customers totaled more than 10,000. So we developed a well-running product mix in 2020, and that's actually going to encourage upselling and cross-selling among different products and services. As a result, you can see that the growth of ARPU is much faster than the growth of the number of paying customers in 2020.
Meanwhile, you can see the number of registered business users reached 725,000 in 2020, which represents an increase of almost 30% from 2019. So this fast-growing user base provides us with a great customer conversion potential for this year. On top of that, we also increased our investment in the marketing to help fund the sales leads. We believe our conversion rate will further improve through the -- our upgraded branding and marketing campaign. From the beginning of last year, we started to separate our sales team into 2 groups, the new customer acquisition team and the existing customer renewal team, so that each group of sales can be more focused and efficient. And in the longer run, we believe we can see a steady upward trend in our ARPU.
But we have to say that ARPU is only a result of our growing user base, improving customer conversion and superior product mix. And we will keep working on building a stronger business, hence driving up the ARPU. So basically, this is my feedback on the ARPU. Regarding your second question on the synergies after acquiring Xiopin, I think I have a few views here. So basically, we completed investment in Xiopin in the fourth quarter of 2020. And the main purpose of this investment is to enrich our products and services to our individual users. We are now providing services that include service advisory, certificate training and all the way to curve consulting to individual users. And our synergy with Xiopin can be elaborated in multiple dimensions. So basically, Liepin has already leveraged our technological capability in supporting Xiopin and this is what Liepin has been very good at in the past couple of years.
Ultimately, you will help Xiopin to achieve a more sophisticated platform and better user experience. We also provide technical support to Xiopin's mid-office business management teams such as the finance system, HR system, even the support on their legal aspects, which empowers Xiopin for its long-term sustainable growth with more complete organizational structure.
And basically Xiopin is still a very fast-growing stage. It's key strategy is to capture more market share and facilitate our group's development in professional career services. And our to see revenue will be further improved with Xiopin's contribution. I think regarding your last part of this question, right, I think I would say last year, Xiopin is almost like breakeven business, and we should be able to make a small profit for 2021. And there's still a lot of things to do for us to improve the operational efficiency.
Yes. I will add some points regarding to your 2 questions. The first question is about the ARPU and expansion in segmentation. I think clearly, there's a strategy that this year, we will continuously to expand our business to cover more customers. And we -- I think the strategy we used will be very different versus the business before, because before we used a very high -- we actually used a relatively higher price to acquire the new customers. But I think last year, we -- long-term test, we find that we can acquire some new customer to be free users first and then we convert them to the paying user. That way will be much more efficient versus before.
And I think this year, we will continue to run this one. And the marketing expense will be very important to us in this year. So we will drive our clients to be the free users first and then we leverage the sales team to convert them into a higher ARPU paying customer. So the balance for us is very important, how can we drive the balance between the much more user -- customer users and relatively high output. That's the balance we need to drive.
And regarding to your second question about Xiopin. Today, as we walked in, I just mentioned about the synergies that we have already done. But I would like to mention that what Xiopin's business is it. Xiopin, majorly, they have some business like a career certification training program. For example, your teachers -- teacher certification and also like a MBA examination training program. So this kind of certification actually helping the professionals to get much more reliable jobs in the society and also they can go to the MBA college.
So this is really the need for our users. And we observe that if -- so this will be the good fit and good integration. And from the other side, we see that there are some events actually happened in the online education recently. We find that many -- I mean, the top online education company, they are employing their teachers. Their employees actually require a certificate to get on board. So we see there a huge demand from this online education company. They need to recruit the teachers with the certificate.
So to us, there's another way that is a good fit to how can we train more and get more user -- get more students to get the training program from Xiopin and then after graduation, they could get the certificate and then they can get on board in the online education companies. So this is a good fit from 2B side and 2C side. So I think the integration will be more strengthened in this year. And we also can foresee there some revenue growth and some profit from this business. So this is my answer to your question.
And your next question comes from the line of Steven Tsai.
Congratulations on the solid results. My first question is related to your margins. So others do the increase in sales and marketing spending in fourth quarter reflect strong demand recovery? So just wondering how we should think about your margin trend in the first quarter as well as full year 2021. And my second question is related to the flexible staffing business. Could you give us some update on the development of this business in terms of maybe revenue contribution for 2020, as well as how your offerings differentiate from those provided by the traditional staffing agencies?
Sure. I'll take the question first before Rick add his view. I think regarding the margin, I think overall from the gross margin perspective, we've been enjoying a quite healthy gross margin around 78%, 79%. And based on our product mix, I think we're still going to continue to deliver this going forward. Regarding the bottom line, right, non-GAAP OP as a percentage of revenue. I think nowadays, I think we're around 13% in 2020 based on the annual results. We do have a lot of room to improve the margin from this perspective. And we can still have our marketing and sales activities along the year, plus we're still want to invest in R&D going forward.
So basically this is not something we're really going to pay attention in 2021. What we wanted to focus more is really on the growth of the top line in order to seize more market share, no matter from the mid- to high-end talent acquisition business or from the new initiatives that we had from 2 years back. But I think in the longer run, the margin will ultimately be improved to around 20%-ish in 3 to 5 years regarding the non-GAAP OP as a percentage of revenue. So this is my comments on the margin for your first question.
Regarding your second question on the flexible staffing, right. I would say, during the economic downturn and facing the influence of COVID-19 pandemic, the flexi staffing business was more widely accepted by the corporates. And we need to search in the flexi staffing industry last year as well with the market size exceeding RMB 100 billion in China. The flexi staffing business is still at a, this is our view, right, still at an early stage with mild competition. What really differentiates us from the rest of the players is our SaaS platform to serve the operations at customers instead of the offline delivery.
At this stage, adding more power will ensure a certain growth, but simply to accumulate of manpower will actually limit the sustainable growth as the business scale up. We've actually developed a SaaS platform called Hold Out to support the online matching of the job posting and job seekers. And we also developed the [indiscernible] system to ensure the efficient business flow at the operation level. And the digitalization of our flexible staffing segment provides a solid foundation for our scalable business growth in the future.
And all these system develops was leveraging Liepin's advanced technology capability from the group level. And the group was able to support the business with our technology in digitization and empower its long-term sustainable growth. Therefore, we actually have been very pleased to see that, although we just started our flexible staffing business less than 2 years ago, our flexible staffing employees already reached around 10,000 people. And our business got almost tripled in 2020.
Looking into 2021, I would still expect a very robust growth in this business segment. And we also have a view for the near future, right? We actually believe China's flexible staffing business will evolve towards a more mature form where white collar positions are more demanded on top of the blue collar or gray colors as you might see for the moment. With our advanced technology and our advantage in the mid- to high-end talent pool, I think we will be very expecting a second wave of the growth of our flexible staffing business in the future. Rick?
I would like to add some points about the flexible staffing. I would like to highlight 2 important points. Firstly, our platform is different versus the traditional suppliers, because we are building a digital platform. How can we explain the digital platform? There are 3 points. Okay. Firstly, all the operations, we put it online. For example, you can see how can we interact with our customers. There's the online SaaS platform. So the customer can build it online, we're very transparent. And secondly, when we do something like a contract signature with the individual users, they're all online. And then, for example, the salary and payment, they are all online.
So what we do is that we leverage our technology products. Actually, we connect the individual users online. So this is the digital way that we are doing. And secondly, how can we make a digital way? If you can see that our relationship between the traditional supplier actually is very interesting. They are our suppliers as well.
We actually -- we post our task to all the suppliers that we qualified and then they will provide the staff to us so that we can together to fulfill the needs of the customers. So you can see there's the ecosystem platform as well. So this is a very, very advanced platform for the flexible staffing business, extremely different versus traditional suppliers.
And then the second point I would like to say is that this there's a huge demand after reviewing the result in 2020. Actually, if you can see, physically, there's difficulty for the customers in the first half of 2020. But the second half, we see the very huge demand. And as a result, you can see that our result from the -- our business growth from the flexible staffing actually quite high. I think we disclosed a number that is like 1 or 2x versus the year before. So this is a huge advance based on the staff platform.
And lastly, I would like to mention -- give you some points that we see this trend is -- continues to be very strong in Q4 last year and also this Q. And we can foresee that we will enjoy a very high growth this year as well. So this is some key points I would like to highlight for the flexible staffing.
And your next question comes from the line of Binbin Ding.
Congratulations on a strong quarter. I have 2 questions. First is about the overall recruitment market demand. So now I think China economy has already fully recovered from the COVID-19. Can you give us some color regarding the demand recovery of your business customers in a few key industries into 2021? Especially for the SME customers, have you seen the demand of these customers has recovered to the pre-pandemic level?
My second question is about your new initiatives. From last year, you have identified a few new growth area during the pandemic such as online survey, flexible staffing, et cetera. So among all these relatively new initiatives, what is our top priority in the next 1 to 2 years? And how shall we look at the long term contribution to look like?
Sure. Thanks, Binbin. So regarding the recovery of the recruitment market. So if you look at the whole market, there have been signs of recovery starting from the second half of 2020. Actually, the momentum continued to pick up in the rest of the year. Based on the number of job postings within the first week of the spring festival holiday in 2021, the market actually rebounded significantly this year. And if you look back in the first half of 2020, we actually took more defensive measures to ensure the stability of our existing customers.
And starting from the second quarter, our recruitment business gradually started to recover. And Liepin took a leading position in the business recovery itself. Therefore, we've firmly adjusted our strategy by putting more strength on the developing new opportunities, especially in recovering emerging industries. As a result, our recruitment business showed a very positive growth in the fourth quarter if you compare with 2019.
And if we look at the hiring sentiment, the industries that we are serving showed quite remarkable recovery from the pandemic as well, especially like TMT and real estate industry as well. Meanwhile, we noticed that some emerging business segments like online education, corporate digitalization, community group buying business [indiscernible] were benefiting from the pandemic and physical restrictions.
During the post-pandemic period, the manufacturing industries like 5G and infrastructure surged with the support from more favorable policies from the government. Therefore, starting from the second quarter of 2020, we've kept digging new business opportunities and further expanding our user coverage. When we are facing the severe influence from the pandemic, we do have some observations of the industrial movement. Firstly is that the penetration rate of the online recruitment business kept climbing. We believe, with the boosted efficiency and gradually developed users' habits, online recruitment could be embraced by more Chinese enterprises in the future.
Secondly, during the enterprise structure upgrade, more and more mid- to high-end talents are largely demanded and required. Basically, how to further improve the efficiency of matching. It is definitely one of the prettier topics for the industry. And we, as a market leader, always try to boost recruitment efficiency by leveraging technology, and this is the topic for quite a long time. And we will continuously create value and lead the development of talent services industries and be part of contributing to the Chinese enterprise upgrade.
Regarding the new business initiatives and new products, basically what we think is -- we actually initiated our branding or marketing campaign in 2020, which actually helps us serve a wider range of users by targeting younger generations on top of the mid- to high-end talent. Our service in mass recruitment market is mainly campus recruitment. We've worked with more than 10,000 of key customers who spoke highly of our product and services quality. So naturally, they would prefer us to cover more of their recruitment needs on top of the mid- to high-end recruitment.
That's why after basically leveraging our technological advantage by delivering the services primarily online, such as online interviews and online campus recommendations, this actually gives us a very good gross margin compared with the traditional campus recruitment. We also tap into, as you just mentioned, right, into services like starting online surveys, certificate trainings, right? I think after doing so, we will already establish an ecosystem along the HR service value chain or talent service value chain. And we will keep on upgrading our product mix and looking for new commercial opportunities as we strive to provide this one-stop intellectual talent service to our customers.
And regarding the potential monetization opportunities, I think we will gradually consider to charge from the online interviews or from lower priced packaging for the new customers with recruitment needs other than mid- to high-end talents. Also with our survey products, we saw great potential to raise the price for the SaaS products, but I think, for the moment, we still need to think about how to repackage the products and services to support the price increase. And this has been one of our key focuses in the first half of 2021. And then, Rick, do you have any comment?
Yes. I'll give you an overall point of view, how can we look at the whole company's strategy. Just now, you mentioned that there's a recovery rate about the recruitment industry. I can tell you that, firstly, we see that there's very high sentiment of the customer, that we like to recruit more talent than before. And especially in some industries like digital technology and new energy car and like high-end manufacturing. And also TMT. Those -- all these industries have a very high demand for talent. So this year, you will see that our whole business will go rapidly. And we are expecting our core energy and core focus will concentrate on this recruitment area, which we can see that for the overall business growth, it will be very fast.
And our overall group actually, we structure our group like this. We base on our recruitment platform. There's one side to be one-size 2C. So there's a 2B and 2C side. Based on 2B side, actually, we explore that how can we provide more services besides the recruitment -- the talent acquisition, that kind of service.
So we see that last year, we explored how can provide like online training and survey and also the staffing, that kind of business. And after 1 year experience that we are much more clear there. Firstly, we need to focus on our core business, that is the recruitment because this is a platform that help us to get more customers on B side and more candidates on C side.
So -- and then based on the inside, there's a lot of customers, then we can provide even more products so that we can further grow our stickiness with the customers. And we are pleased to see that last year, we explored that for the survey business. We find that lots of customers, they will -- they are much more care about their employee experience than before because of the pandemic, because they would like to know what does their organization look like and then whether the employees are satisfied or not. So this is the way it's very focused on the employee experience management.
And then we find that this kind of a SaaS platform is really can help us to drive the engagement with the customers. And on the other hand, we find that the -- for the online education can help us to strengthen our service to provide to the 2C. So this is a very important initiative for us. So if you ask me what will be the top party for our initiatives this year, I would tell you that, firstly, We will focus on our core business that is recruiting platform. This is very, very important.
And on the other side, we will set the other priority for our online survey to help the employee -- the employer to understand the employee experience. And on the other side, we will build the online education to satisfy much more needs from the fleet. So this is the overall structure for our strategy.
Our next question comes from the line of Wei Xiong.
Rick and Tian, congratulations on the solid results. I also have 2 questions. My first question is that management mentioned just now that we see the positive trend of improving penetration of online recruiting services last year. So I wonder, if we look out longer term, as the economy gradually recovers from the COVID-19 impact, how should we think about the normalized growth trend for the online recruiting industry? And what will be our strategy to defend our market-leading position and continue to outperform than other industry peers, for example, in terms of product or marketing, et cetera?
And my second question, I just want to follow up on the new businesses. So we've talked about how we see great monetization potential for these new businesses. So I wonder, could management give us some more color on the level of growth or revenue contribution that we can expect from these new businesses for the next few years? And what's our plan or the level of investment that we should be able to see -- in order to improve the monetization for these new businesses?
Yes. Sure. Thanks, Xiong Wei. I think that's actually a very good question. Regarding your first question, I think in last year 2020, we recovered rapidly from the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and registered remarkable growth against the market headwinds, which is obvious. And the result was particularly credit to the substantial growth and strong resilience of our core mid- to high-end recruitment market. And this is the foundation of the business that Rick just mentioned. And this is also going to be the core for us this year as well.
And at the same time, we were delighted to see that our diversification in the talent service industry has definitely brought us some strong resilience as well. Our new initiatives on -- basically on quite high growth paths as they continue to mature under the Liepin Group that will provide new sources of growth to our group in the near future and represent our second or third growth curve.
And our revenue structure will definitely be further optimized by them. We can see that in 2020, the online survey services, online training and flexible staffing business definitely went through growth spurts, which attributed to our integration plan, in technology, back office system and our management team. And I think this business, we're able to deliver outstanding results with our full scope support from the management team from the Liepin Group.
Meanwhile, you can see that on the 2B side, we actually expanded our business streams along the talent service value chain. As our relationship with customers is getting stronger, and we're involved deeper in their business, we were able to explore and seize more upsell and cross-selling opportunities.
And looking at the 2C side, the new business stream also providing us with a larger user base and further well rounded service packages. And basically, this will in turn improve our user experience and enhance the user stickiness. I believe this kind of measures are all going to stimulate the conversion of users to customers because of more comprehensive products and services and, therefore, opens up more monetization opportunities for us and help us with the integration of the new initiatives. This is my view on the first question.
I think the second question could be quite straight forward. I think we expect that the application of the vaccines and the ease of COVID-19 pandemic, we achieved the recruitment recovery to at least 20% to 30% CAGR. And for us, focusing on our users value and technological innovations are definitely the most important things to serve our customers. And we pioneered and led the market by continuously creating values and disrupting the market in this relatively traditional industry. I think Rick just mentioned, right, we're definitely going to focus on a few key strategies. Product, R&D with a lot of technology together with further expanding our HR review services on both 2B and 2C sides to make sure we have developed the whole ecosystem.
And I think if you think about the view from the management on the 2021, right, I would think 30% growth would be something where we are looking at for the moment. But definitely, we have much more aggressive target internally so that we can make sure we have a good year going forward. Yes. Rick, do you have a comment?
Yes. I think this is a very good question. Firstly, let me explain how we are going to do and what is something that we have already done in the past so that to make sure that we have the product superiority and to defend against the competition. Firstly, I think we continuously to invest in R&D. That means we realize that -- we always realize that product is the most important thing for us. And as you can see that we actually explore lots of new initiatives in terms of the new product features, like interview robot. And also we -- recently, we upgraded our communication methodology between the customers and the individuals.
We use the virtual numbers so that the customer call the individuals, they will stick to our platform, so can help us to drive the customer engagement. And so this kind of the product innovation, that is very important for us, and we want to keep our advantage in this area. On the other hand, because we continue to invest in AI and the big data, actually, our team grew much bigger than before in last year. We hired a very good talent from the market with very experience in AI and data analysis. So he can help us to further -- to improve our matching algorithm. And the result in this year, actually, in the first quarter, we already see a very superior than the last year.
Secondly, I would like to say how can we drive the new segmentation to be kind of much more a bigger coverage in talent side. And you will notice that this year, actually, we're rebranding our brand to be a new and a young position in the market. As you can see that our logo changed, actually, our product -- all the products, VI already changed, UI changed. So all this change actually we received lot of good and lots of positive comments from our users and customers because they find it much more easier to use, and they find Liepin is much more active and young and passionate.
And also, we -- actually, we hired a very famous star [indiscernible] as our celebrity. As you can see that the celebrity can drive a very good impact in the younger people. As you can see today, the talent actually become much more younger than before. And then this younger talent, they are really seeking for a different kind of style. So this is what we have already done in marketing.
I think looking forward, we continue to drive the young passionate image in the market and also to highly invest in R&D to help us to keep the advantage of our products. So this is the key points I would like to mention, that I think this is a very good question because this is the foundation for our team.
Secondly, I would like to say how can -- how do I view the monetization for the new initiative in the future. Firstly, we see that all our initiatives actually based on our value creation. So what I specifically mean that that's the customer value creation and the user value creation. For our new initiative, what we have already done is that we will, based on our customer needs, and there are demands to create new initiative rather than we just launched a new initiative.
I'll give you one example. If you can see there's -- during the pandemic, actually launch of organization, they faced a very huge challenge that the trust level will become low between the employee and the employer. So the 360 employee survey become very important in this way. And the customer, actually they just find this feature in online by themselves rather than we sell them. So we see there's a niche and then we quickly say this is a new monetization way to provide value-added SaaS platform for them to understand what the employees, they are feeling and then their satisfaction and also their professionalism.
So this is the very good example that our feature, our new initiative, actually based on the value creation of the customer and users rather than we put it onto the market, and we test. And based on this, our monetization will be very natural rather than we put it on sale and then we push it to the customer. So this is my point towards how can we make the monetization in the future initiatives.
Rick and Tim, congratulations again on a solid quarter.
And our last question comes from the line of Frank Tao.
A quick follow-up question here. If you could share some breakdown on the contribution from the customers in the new industries that you have mentioned, like the industries other than the financial industry and TMT. And also for the user acquisition in the new industries. Just wondering if you may have some targets for the business user acquisition in the new industries in 2021?
Sorry, I didn't quite catch your question. Can you repeat that a little bit slowly?
So could management share some breakdown on the contribution from the customers in the new industries that you just have mentioned, like the community group purchase like these kind of industries, the industries other than financial and TMT industries. This is the first question. And a quick follow-up is on the user acquisition strategy in the new industries, like you may have some target for the business user acquisition in new industries in 2021.
Yes, sure. I think Just -- I think the answer to your first question is quite straightforward. So basically, our products and services are actually suitable to customers in all industries. But definitely, we use our AI analytics to identify which industrial segments will have the best opportunities. Definitely, this is one we're always doing, right. But overall, I think we are providing standard SaaS features services and value-added tools which could actually fulfill diversified customers' needs. And regarding the customer acquisition question, right? I think, firstly, we've enriched our product mix to precisely meet diversified customers' needs, in different user groups so that the sales activities would be more accurate in targeting the right customer group. I think this is the key.
And we will also pay extra attention to track and analyze the job positions in the major cities or Tier 1 or Tier 2 cities, which basically allows us to improve our sales efficiency and online marketing. This is also something we're trying to improve in the past 1 or 2 years. And basically, we built a very advanced data realization center to mirror the product development, marketing and sales strategies for the target groups and target regions. And this technology is gradually put into practice and where we saw some good results from it.
So after attending the sales leads from our marketing campaigns or activities, our new customer acquisitions sales team will actually go all in [indiscernible] the potential customers. And afterwards, our renewal team will be able to upsell with a higher price based on their additional needs. And we refined our KPI basically at the beginning of this year for the sales team by encouraging the new customer acquisitions. Basically, we believe this will further drive up the conversion rate with all the actions that we took.
There are no further questions at this time, sir please continue.
I think time's up, right? But I think, thanks, everyone, for joining our 2020 4Q and full year earnings call. And if you have a further questions or you want to have another sort of follow-ups, just feel free to send us an e-mail to IR@liepin.com, and we'll be happy to take your call. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, everyone. And last thing I would like to say is that after 2020, the whole team are much more confident than before because during such a difficult pandemic, such a difficult economic environment, we delivered such a robust growth in terms of the top line and bottom line.
So I think in 2021, we are much more confident than before that we will deliver very good result. And today, we are working very hard to improve our product day and day. So you will see our product change if you experience our products. Thank you.
Thank you, guys. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for joining. You may all disconnect.