The largest number of Facebook application developers in the Asia-Pacific region comes from a country where Facebook has been banned since 2009: China.
Bloomberg reported that China accounts for 20 percent of Facebook app developers in the region, and the social network established an office in Hong Kong last year with an eye toward both those developers and Chinese advertisers.
Facebook’s partners in China include game developers Rekoo.com and Shanda Games, according to Bloomberg, and David Lim, a partner engineer at the social network’s mobile developer relations division, told Bloomberg:
We now have Chinese-language help pages for developers, and we are working on giving them better support. Developers in mainland China are important to us.
Facebook has more than developers on its mind, however, as Lim told Bloomberg the company plans to expand its mobile advertising business in Asia, inserting messages into the news feeds of mobile users in the region, and Facebook itself said in its initial public offering filing:
Users are generally restricted from accessing Facebook from China. 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.
