Asia-Pacific Market Key To Facebook Inc (FB)’s Future

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Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is a company that is definitively on the rise. After a sticky initial stock market flotation, and some recent criticism and negative speculation about the ability of the social media company to attract new users, things are looking up for Facebook. The share price of the company has risen significantly over the last twelve months, and with Facebook attracting billions of users worldwide, it remains the only social media company which has displayed a clear way to monetarize its user base and make a significant profit.

Asia-Pacific Market Key To Facebook Inc (FB)'s Future

Mobile growth success story

Central to this achievement has been the key mobile sector. There are two basic reasons for this. Firstly, mobile technology is growing at a rate that few other forms of technology have achieved. Smartphones are some of the biggest selling consumer products in the world – possibly the biggest – and tablet computers have been asserted by the Daily Telegraph to be the fastest growing form of technology in history.

Secondly, mobile technology is intrinsically associated with social media. When people, particularly young people, are sitting on public transport, or spending a few quite moments in a coffee shop or bar, you can bet your bottom dollar that their attention will instantly turn to their smartphone or tablet. And as often as not they will spend at least some of their time browsing Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) or tweeting; the success of Facebook has simply come about due to its vast user base and ability to attract more of these users in the mobile sector.

With 4G technology making mobile surfing ever more sophisticated, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has the opportunity to expand its mobile operations further in the future, and it is quite clear that this will be an essential part of its strategy. And some figures came to light this week which suggest those in charge of Facebook’s future direction need not worry too much when it comes to expanding its mobile user base.

Asia-Pacific growth potential

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has hundreds of millions of active users all over the world, and the Asia-Pacific region is no exception to this rule. However, it has emerged that the market penetration of Facebook in Asia-Pacific in comparison to the number of smartphones resident in the region is actually pretty small.

While Facebook has over 200 million users in the Asia-Pacific region, this is dwarfed by the number of smartphone users in the same geographical area. This figure is close to 800 million, meaning that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has something in the region of a 30 percent market penetration at least within the mobile strata. This is in vast contrast to other major geographical regions, where there are usually at least as many Facebook users as smartphone users, and sometimes more.

It is clear going forward that taking advantage of this untapped Asia-Pacific market will be key for Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s growth. This is a theme that will play out over and over again in many industries in the 21st century, as the importance of the ‘emerging economies’ becomes more obvious. For now, exploiting this potentially rich market offers Facebook a huge opportunity.

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