Facebook Inc. (FB), whose website has
been restricted in China since 2009, said it has more
application development partners in the country than any other
part of Asia.
Developers of software from China make up about 20 percent
of Facebook’s partner network in Asia, David Lim, a partner
engineer at the company’s mobile developer relations division,
said in an interview in Hong Kong today. Chinese app developers
are using Facebook (FB) to reach overseas users, Lim said, without
providing figures.
Facebook is wooing software firms in China to help bolster
its apps lineup for the more than 800 million people worldwide
who use its social-networking service. The Menlo Park,
California-based company last month said in its filing for a
proposed $5 billion initial public offering that it is
continuing to evaluate entering China, the world’s biggest
Internet market.
“We now have Chinese-language help pages for developers,
and we are working on giving them better support,” said Lim.
“Developers in mainland China are important to us.”
Facebook’s partners in China include Rekoo.com, a Beijing-
based provider of games, Lim said at the World Internet
Developers’ Summit conference.
Restrictions in China
China bans pornography, gambling and material critical of
the ruling Communist Party on the Internet by requiring local
Web companies to self-censor content, and blocking overseas
websites including Facebook and Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Youtube. The
country had 513 million Internet users at the end of 2011,
according to the government-backed China Internet Network
Information Center. That’s more than the combined populations of
the U.S. and Japan.
“Users are generally restricted from accessing Facebook
from China,” the company said in its Feb. 1 regulatory filing
for its IPO. “We do not know if we will be able to find an
approach to managing content and information that will be
acceptable to us and to the Chinese government.”
Shanda Games Ltd. (GAME), China’s third-biggest online games
company, is working on titles for Facebook users, Alan Tan,
chief executive officer at the Shanghai-based company, said in
November.
Facebook plans to expand its mobile advertising business in
Asia, Lim said. Advertisers will now be able to insert marketing
messages into the news feed feature for people who access
Facebook from wireless handsets, Mike Hoefflinger, customer
marketing director at Facebook, said Feb. 29.
More than 400 million people, or over half of Facebook’s
users, now access the service on mobile devices, Lim said.
Last year, Facebook set up an office in Hong Kong, a
special administrative region of China, and said it may win
business from Chinese advertisers.
In Asia, Facebook has offices in Hong Kong, Singapore,
Seoul and Hyderabad, India, Lim said.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Mark Lee in Hong Kong at
wlee37@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Tighe at
mtighe4@bloomberg.net