Facebook's Asia strategy: How can China connect the world without it?

Editor's note: The original author is Benjamin Joffe, CEO of +8* (Plus Eight Star), a digital industry strategy consultancy, who has been working on the Asian technology market and has delivered speeches at more than 100 professional conferences, such as SXSW. He has also studied China's Internet market, and Tencent and everyone are his subjects. He also expressed his views on the upcoming Facebook development Strategy in Asia. Facebook's listing is important for mobility, as well as for the development of Asia and even the world. I'm a foreigner, but I've been in Asia for years, and I've been studying several major Asian markets long before Facebook was born. So, I think I should be qualified to talk about Facebook's Asian strategy. Facebook has less than 15% of its market share in Japan, Russia and South Korea, according to Facebook's S1 file, and in China the market share is almost 0 because of restrictions. So Facebook has a lot of room for growth in Asia. Asian market is not a whole Asia contains too many elements, different countries have different languages, different cultures, user habits and cultural habits, local Internet environment and policy is also very different. To see through the Asian market, we must start with each country separately. China's Internet development is very fast and the market potential is enormous. But the local restrictions, like those of terrorists, have been a headache for foreign companies, and Google's promotion in China has been a major setback, you know. Once in China, it also means unusually fierce competition. China already has two successful social-networking listed companies: Tencent (with a company market value of $53.4 billion) and everyone (listed in New York last May, now worth 2.43 billion dollars). Everyone compares himself to China's Facebook and grabs a listing before its foreign relatives, but there is a big difference. In terms of revenues alone, everyone is nowhere near as close to Facebook. Last year its total revenue was only 118 million dollars, half of which came from advertising revenue and other games. And compared to Facebook's openness, everyone has a big limit on third-party developers, and most of the games on its website are developed on their own. Tencent Tencent is not inferior. Its 2011 total revenue of 4.5 billion dollars was 20% higher than Facebook's 3.7 billion dollars, with a net profit of 1.6 billion and 62% more than Facebook. Tencent has three social networks: QQ space, friends ' community and QQ (if it counts). QQ Space Active user number is 576 million, friend community is 214 million, QQ user is up to 751 million. Tencent most of the revenue from a variety of games, advertising revenue accounted for only about 7% of the total revenue. Apparently it's with Facebook 's revenue model is diametrically opposed. In Japan, Facebook was slightly resisted in Japan at first because of web design problems (the Japanese are said to dislike the box and color) and the real-name system, but it is now firmly entrenched and the market is open. The number of Japanese users in Facebook is around 10 million, and Japan, with less than half of the U.S. population, has the advantage of higher GDP and an excellent IT infrastructure. As the world's second-largest online advertising market, Japan naturally becomes the market for Facebook. Also worth mentioning is that Japan's two major mobile gaming companies Gree and Mobage in 2012, respectively, 575 million U.S. dollars and 526 million of dollars, and maintain a stable profit. This is good news for Facebook, which means that the market for mobile gaming in Japan is promising. South Korea's largest international content delivery network provider Akamai statistics show that the current speed of the Internet development in South Korea is the fastest in the world. As early as a decade ago, Cyworld, a Facebook-like social-networking site, was in South Korea, losing the momentum of a young enterprise after being bought by SK in 2003, so it wasn't a big threat to Facebook, which landed in South Korea last year. Other Asian markets I think of Facebook's biggest shooting game, Uberstrike, developed by Cmune, a beijing-based company, but ironically, the game is not played in China because it is based on a Facebook page and Facebook has not yet landed in China. And in China, game developers can get a small share of the divide. It is reported that everyone and developers 55 of the split, and Tencent is 91 split (heard is now 73). At the same time, the average Chinese player generates only one-fifth or even one-tenth of us players, so Cmune chose to use the United States as the starting point for uberstrike. There are also many Filipino and Indonesian players, but most are not paid for underage players. On the contrary, Singapore and Malaysia are good markets. Social games and mobile companies have also benefited a lot in Thailand and Vietnam, and even India has attracted a lot of developers to go for gold. How big is the market potential in Asia, as we said before, once Facebook has access to China, it will face a bitter battle; it can get good revenue in Japan, but it is fiercely competitive in the mobile sector; South Korea looks like a good market with relatively little competition, but too few users Other countries may be able to bring in more users, but revenue growth could take years. In Asia, the number of Android users is also growing, and Facebook's mobile business begins after its trip to gold.