Facebook to enter China within three months?
April 6th, 2010 by CC | Posted in News | 16 Comments »Two years ago, there were reports about Facebook entering China, but now there is new inside information? I was pretty surprised when reading this news, especially because I just did a post comparing Renren (Chinese Facebook) and Facebook.
From iFeng:
On April 7, according to a reliable source, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, is preparing to enter China. If all goes well, this plan will be implemented within 3 months. Facebook has two ways to enter China: first, through a joint venture, and second, through cooperation and acquisition.
Now, I’m not sure if this source is truly reliable, but the same report is coming from Sina and some other technology oriented sites as well. Is there other evidence? According to the iFeng article:
Facebook was registered with a ".cn" domain name in 2006, and that was when the media world also disseminated this information in China. Additionally, afterwards Li Jiacheng invested more than 100 million U.S. dollars into Facebook and Facebook’s potential entry into China was again brought up. However, thus far, Facebook is still hovering on the outside.
So, it seems that there has been a build-up of events for Facebook to enter China. Who is this Li Jiacheng? He is an extra wealthy Chinese that probably knows where to invest his money. He is Chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings Limited and according to Forbes in 2008, Li Jiacheng had total assets of up to 265 billion dollars.
I think if Facebook does enter China, they will probably have to agree to having their servers in China, or at least agree to a pretty strict and binding agreement in terms of content management. Google just tried to prove that they "Do no evil," and now Facebook might be changing their game plan.
Chinese internet experts are not too optimistic about Facebook’s ability to capture a sizable market share in China. Hu Yanping, the Director of DCCI Internet data centers in China, said that it will be very hard for Facebook to expand in China’s current Internet environment, for most social networking already happens on QQ, Renren, or Kaixin001.
Pretty strategic of China, right? Let local businesses get a firm grounding, and then let in the outsiders to fight for the leftovers. Though Facebook’s performance has been spectacular – they recently surpassed Google as the most visited site in the U.S. Maybe that gave them enough of a confidence boost so they’re not considering entry into the country with the most Internet users in the world.
Tags: Facebook, Internet, Social Networking, Software, Technology, Website
Great news. I agree it’ll be hard but they never considered the plethora of Americans and citizens of other countries already using Facebook. For those who want to network with people outside of China, Facebook is their only option.
[...] интернет-эксперты сомневаются в успехе Facebook на территории КНР, т.к. рынок уже давно [...]
I only want to say, too late.
the problem was that they blocked it 2 years ago, along with anything American on it. Like myspace is half blocked, but myspace china has half the functions and features and its extremely boring. Twitter, youtube, all the stinkin hacker sites for Iphone rendered useless by the fucking “great firewall” of China. If it wasn’t for some good VPNs I would have to wait to go to korea to get anything done. China GOV is highly enfluenced by home land companie and or making more money.
They should come out and say it. We block anything that affects local business their ability to make maximum profit. Form of protectionism if I might say so myself.
Li Jiacheng is better known in English as Li Ka-shing, often called Asia’s richest man.
Facebook to enter China within three months?…
On April 7, according to a reliable source, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, is preparing to enter China. If all goes well, this plan will be implemented within 3 months. Facebook has two ways to enter China: first, through a joint…
Facebook is a CIA operation. You’re not missing anything.
Facebook has nothing to lose (even if their attempt of “conquering” the Chinese market fails) and A LOT to gain!!!
Applaud to any effort that foreign companies made to enter the Chinese market. Consumers will gain from the competition. One friendly recommendation to Facebook is to find a decent Chinese name (remember 谷歌’s lose?). 脸书 is kind of OK but you should definitely try to avoid being called 非死不可.
Your translation for FB is interesting
this is great to think I will not have to use a proxy server!
I am counting the days….
五毛党万岁！
[...] inside information of Facebook to enter China came in mid-April 2010, said that the earliest will be within three months. Then followed by a [...]
[...] inside information of Facebook to enter China came in mid-April 2010, said that the earliest will be within three months. Then followed by a [...]
O_o omg, >..< <3
[...] я уже сослался) статистических и другие данных [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, [...]
Why not try FBVPN, you can use it to access it from china