Facebook Inc may be eyeing a move into China, but Web firms there cast doubt on whether the social networking giant can tap the monster market — assuming authorities lift a ban on the site.
China has the world’s biggest Internet population, with 420 million users and rising. It is a hugely lucrative landscape, but is also peppered with dominant domestic brands, technical hurdles and the threat of censorship.
Beijing has set up a vast online censorship system sometimes dubbed the “Great Firewall of China” that aggressively blocks sites and snuffs out Internet content on topics considered sensitive.
Photo: Reuters
The system currently prevents most of the nation’s Web users from accessing Facebook. The key role the Web site played in anti-government protests in Egypt and Tunisia will not have gone unnoticed by China’s leaders.
However, Facebook last week said it had opened a Hong Kong office, its third in Asia, while founder Mark Zuckerberg visited China in December, prompting suggestions that Beijing may eventually welcome the California-based company.
Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s vice president and commercial director for emerging markets, played down any imminent move into the country.
“We have no plans right now to talk about entering into mainland China and trying to be aggressive in that,” he said at Hong Kong Social Media Week, which wrapped up on Friday.
Still, Facebook already has an estimated 14 million Chinese--language users — mainly based in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong — and the figure is expected to keep growing.
However, even if Facebook got clearance for a China foray, some observers said it would have trouble adapting to local tastes.
“China is a different market,” said Jeffery Zheng, general manager of renren.com (人人網), a popular social networking site in China.
“A lot of companies like Yahoo and Google tried unsuccessfully to penetrate the Chinese market. You have to satisfy local needs,” he said.
Last year, search engine Google Inc claimed it was the victim of a sophisticated cyber attack in 2009 that originated from China, apparently aiming to gain access to e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Google shut down its Chinese search engine, automatically re-routing Chinese users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong, but later ended the automatic redirect to avoid having its Chinese license suspended.
Zheng said his firm had notched up 170 million registered users by the end of last year, a 400 percent increase from 2008, because of “unique” services, such as letting customers choose their own wallpaper, background music and Lunar New Year-themed emoticons.
“Chinese netizens love to share their emotions indirectly ... This is reflected in their profuse use of emoticons,” he added of the yellow “smiley” symbol.
“The Internet has become a way for them to communicate in a relaxed way,” Zheng added.
Meg Lee (李婉明), general manager of the Hong Kong version of Sina.com (新浪), a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter, said her firm has enabled Chinese users to blog by text messaging from their mobile phones.
“In China, people send a lot of SMS to family and friends,” she said. “We provide a unique service in synchronizing their SMS messages to their blogs. This is very popular as many people are still using basic mobile phones.”
Lee said that any newcomer to the Chinese market — where Twitter is also banned — would have to wrestle with the country’s strict censorship policies, although some regulations have been gradually relaxed.
“Every environment has game rules. Censorship is the policy in China that everyone has to follow,” she said.
“I know that the government pays special attention to us because we are a social networking site, so we might be considered to be stirring up trouble,” Zheng added. “If a blogger writes strong words against the government on our site, of course we will take it out.”
Still, many Chinese Web users are relatively unconcerned about government censors — as long as they get their daily dose of entertainment gossip.
“Many people just want to follow movie stars and idols,” Lee said.
In fact, the biggest hurdle for Facebook and other firms may be China’s less-than-dependable Internet infrastructure and reams of bureaucratic red tape, said Li Lei, head of online start-up Wincasting.
“It is necessary to get approval from many different governmental departments,” Lei said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”