Stefan Gross-Selbeck, CEO of EBay in Germany for the past four years, will take over from Lars Hinrichs, the founder and current CEO of business network Xing, on 15 January next year, the company announced today.

Hinrichs’ experience will not be lost to Xing. He will join the company’s supervisory board, where he “will continue to support the company in an advisory capacity”, the company said.

Hinrichs was voted “Germany‘s most important internet entrepreneur” by a jury appointed by the German site Deutsche-startups.de in August this year. He established and launched the business network in 2003 under the name Open BC. Later the name changed to Xing and in 2006 the business network was listed.

Growth continued without interruption and today Xing has 6.5 million registered users, of which 514,000 are paying members. In the 3^rd quarter Xing’s revenue jumped 86% to €9.18 million from €4.95 million in the same quarter 2007.    

A single hiccup was experienced early in 2008, when Hinrichs swallowed his pride and removed advertising from profile pages of paying members, after a flood of complaints. Since then, advertising has only been displayed on profile pages of non-paying members.   

In turn, Gross-Selbeck took a knock to his pride and position at EBay recently, when EBay Inc announced a worldwide restructuring plan, which included the lay-off of roughly 10 percent of the staff, the closing down of offices in, among others, Poland and Austria, and the relocation of a number of vital management functions, including marketing services, from Berlin to EBay offices in Switzerland and the UK. Germany is EBay’s second biggest country market after the US.

Dr. Neil Sunderland, chairman of Xing’s advisory board, said: “We look forward to continuing our close cooperation with Hinrichs in his new role on the board. We are convinced Stefan Gross-Selbeck is the right man to build-on Xing’s leading position in Europe and develop the company into a major long-term player in the worldwide web.”

The company said Gross-Selbeck “will launch a new growth phase in the B2B and B2C markets”.  

Online magazine Horizont.net wrote “Gross-Selbeck will introduce new fields of activity and continuously improve the range of services offered to Xing’s members. He will also broaden the internationalization of the business. There will be a brief transition phase, when Hinrichs will help Gross-Selbeck to settle into his new position.”