LinkedIn Getting Closer to China with Hong Kong Office

By | 1 May, 2012

Following the establishment of eight offices in Asia Pacific, professional networking company LinkedIn announced its Hongkong office, which is its 25th office globally. Housing a dozen staffers, the Hong Kong office serves around 470,000 users in the country within the Financial Services, Banking and Information Technology and Services, which are top industries among this population.

Managing Director and Vice President for Asia-Pacific and Japan Arvind Rajan tells ZDNET that the company has setup an office just when professionals in Hong Kong are placing a growing emphasis on social media. “With more than 2,400 regional company offices and over 1,300 regional headquarters, Hong Kong’s skilled talent base and reputation as a leading international center of finance and business make it an important market for LinkedIn, given our aim is to connect the world’s talent with opportunity,” he said.

The Singapore office still continues its operation as regional headquarters for Asia and manages more than 25 million members out of the social network’s 47 million users. We have previously shared that India is the most populous country on LinkedIn, and has marked 14 million users to date. Other hubs also established are in Bangalore, Melbourne and Perth. Australia has over 3 million members, and accounts for almost 60 percent of business professionals.

LinkedIn believes that localized content, hiring and marketing tools are needed especially for its premium subscribers. As for localization, LinkedIn services are already available in Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Japanese and Korean.

With this corporate move, apparently LinkedIn is getting even closer to tap in into China, which is considered the holy grail for any outside social network, with more than half billion internet users as as a potential market, although most international social networks are blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China. Two months ago, the founder Reid Hoffman had been in China discussing and exploring potential deals with local tech giants Baidu, Sina and Renren over the possibility of setting up their business operation in the country.



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