Facebook to enter China, just to set up an office

[Abstract] Although the service is still not available in China, Facebook employees will enter the Chinese market for the first time.

A reliable source revealed in Monday that Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, is currently preparing to join Chinese advertisers to open a sales office in China, which means that although Facebook has yet to launch services in China, But Facebook employees will enter the Chinese market for the first time.

According to the news, Facebook is likely to set up an office in China in the coming year to serve the growing customer base. According to the news, Facebook is currently discussing the leasing of office space at the Fortune Financial centre in Beijing's CBD. Another source said that Facebook has not yet decided whether to hire a full-time employee or a contract worker for the Chinese office because of the need for an operating licence.

Opening an office in China will be an important step for Facebook to enter the Chinese market. As the world's largest internet market, Facebook is still one of its untapped markets. Vaughan Smith, vice president of Facebook, said in an e-mail message Waghan Smith, "For now, our Hong Kong sales team are supporting the business with China." But as more and more Chinese companies are using Facebook's advertising services, we are certainly exploring ways to provide them with more localized support and consider setting up sales offices in China in the future. But Smith did not disclose the time and location of the Facebook China office.

The Chinese market has been a difficult market for us internet companies, including ebay, Yahoo and other US internet giants in the Chinese market. In 2010, Google withdrew from mainland China for reasons of censorship and moved its servers to Hong Kong, switching to Hong Kong domain names and servers to provide simplified Chinese services to mainland users. Micro-blogging Twitter has not yet entered the Chinese market, and professional social networking site LinkedIn has entered the Chinese market by forming a joint venture. There have been recent reports that LinkedIn is planning to expand its Chinese web site and will limit some of its content to meet the regulatory requirements of the Chinese government.

The absence of American social-networking firms in the Chinese market has sparked a boom in local social-networking firms. Sina Weibo, a microblogging service similar to Twitter, has more than 129 million months of active users, and the company made its initial public offering in the US last month. Tencent's micro-mail is more than 355 million users. WhatsApp, similar to the micro-letter, was bought by Facebook at about 19 billion dollars early this year.

Facebook said in its 2012 prospectus that "the complexities of law and regulation" hindered the company from entering the largest number of Internet users in China. But that does not prevent Facebook from doing other business in the Chinese market.

Facebook has been working to provide advertising services to Chinese exporters. The company has thousands of applications developers in China, said Facebook's vice-president, Smith, at the Global Mobile Internet Conference held in Beijing on May 6.

Facebook is currently working to expand revenues in the Asian market. In the first quarter of this year, the company's Asian market revenue of 354 million U.S. dollars, accounting for its total revenue of 14%. In the initial public offering in May 2012, Facebook's Asian market in the first quarter was 118 million dollars, accounting for 11% of total revenue.