Facebook sees developing countries as major growth markets
Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site that recently filed papers to become a public-listed company, is now seeing developing countries like Brazil and India as major growth markets.
In developed countries like America and Britain, the social networking firm’s user-base has already reached saturation point. But developing countries are still promising huge consumer bases to tap.
In its IPO filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission, Facebook said, “We continue to invest in growing our user base, particularly in markets where we are relatively less penetrated. We experienced growth across different geographies, with users in Brazil and India representing a key source of growth.”
The Facebook IPO, in which the Menlo Park, California-based company aims to raise $5 billion, is going to be the floatation. It will outshine Google’s IPO in 2004 when the Internet search firm raised $1.9 billion in the process to become a public-listed company.
Facebook also noted that it achieved near-zero level of penetration in China, one of the fastest developing economies of the world, as access to Facebook was restricted in the country.
But, the number of Facebook users in India jumped to more than double over the past one year.
As of December 31, 2011, Facebook had 46 million active users in India, 37 million in Brazil and 161 million in the US. In total, it had 845 million active users, up 39 per cent from December 31, 2010.
