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Despite the Great Firewall, Facebook’s business is slowly growing in China
According to some insiders, Facebook is still used by Chinese companies seeking to expand their influence beyond the mainland
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Chinese authorities blocked access to Facebook in July 2009, but despite remaining behind the Great Firewall ever since, the world's biggest social network has still managed to infiltrate China's businesses and web infrastructure.
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported Facebook is “taking steps” to open a sales office in China, according to people familiar with the matter.
In as little as a year, Facebook could have boots on the ground for the first time in China, even though the company's site will remain censored.
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Facebook’s VP of special projects Vaughan Smith has been making the rounds in China, appearing at both Stanford and Peking University’s joint China 2.0 forum and the recent Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, where he spoke on how Facebook is being used as an effective marketing tool for Chinese companies to tap into audiences beyond their borders.
Smith went so far as to say that Facebook contributes to China’s economic growth, citing mobile developers and exporters as examples.
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Among them, Facebook has helped Chinese game studio FunPlus expand its social game Family Farm Seaside to an international audience, and Smith said that Facebook was the “number one way” for fashion e-store exporter Wholesale Dress to reach customers outside China.
Smith also added that both Alibaba and Baidu use Facebook’s technology in their data centers.
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