Facebook officially launched its office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 4th, 2016, just two weeks after it opened another office in Manila, Philippines. The KL office opened on May 5th, a day following the launch. According to Facebook’s Careers page, the social networking giant currently has offices in 61 cities, five of which are in Southeast Asia: Bangkok, Thailand; Jakarta, Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila, Philippines; and the Asia-Pacific headquarters, Singapore. Sorry to those who are looking for a job; there are no open positions in Facebook Malaysia at the moment.
Facebook’s KL office isn’t particularly devoted to software development, but instead is focused more towards corresponding with businesses in Malaysia, as more of them no longer have their own blog or news release page, but instead are starting to reach out to their customers through their own Facebook Pages. Facebook’s job here is to help these businesses improve their discoverability and expand their communications, while keeping a targeted audience.
Facebook’s vice president of Asia-Pacific, Dan Neary (pictured fifth from left), who was present at the opening ceremony in its KL Sentral office, gave a few insights as to why Facebook is so interested in setting up shop in Malaysia, and in doubling down on its efforts in Southeast Asia. To set this up, Neary said that there are now a whopping 1.65 billion users on Facebook, with the Facebook Groups section itself having 1 billion users. The Facebook-owned WhatsApp just recently reached 1 billion users, and due to Facebook Messenger’s tight integration with the social network itself, it gets 900 million users. Instagram’s number is not too shabby either, with a total of 400 million users. According to Facebook, there are now 241 million folks in Southeast Asia logging in to Facebook every month, which is 14.61% of total users worldwide; a huge chunk of the pie.
Singling out Malaysia alone, Neary said that there are 18 million Malaysians who access Facebook every month, which is 81% of the total internet user base in the country. Out of that number, 94% or 17 million Facebook users in Malaysia also access the service via mobile every month. In the same period of time, 6.5 million Malaysians use Instagram.
Neary also noted on how Malaysians are a social bunch; we are found to have 1.6 times (or 60%) more “friends” on Facebook than the global average, ranked 10th highest in the world. Another interesting tidbit is that Malaysians are highly engaged on Facebook and clocked 1.7 times (or 70%) more time spent on the social network than on TV.
The launch and opening events also saw Nicole Tan being appointed (pictured third from left) as the head of Facebook Malaysia. She was the former managing director of J. Walter Thompson Malaysia. Tan’s role is to lead her Malaysian-based teams to work closely with businesses, as well as getting these companies to leverage on Facebook’s tools to reach their customers.
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