America Is Basically Irrelevant To The Future Of Facebook?

January 3, 2014 Leave a comment

America Is Basically Irrelevant To The Future Of Facebook

JIM EDWARDS

DEC. 31, 2013, 3:43 PM 2,974 3

In the last few weeks, one of the more popular headlines about Facebook is the idea that it is finally dying, its users drifting away to Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp or Snapchat.

In reality, however, the opposite is happening. In the last year, despite the rise of Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, Facebook actually became more dominant than it was the year before, as this stat from Pew shows:A spokesperson for Facebook sent me a bunch of stats about how the site is doing at the end of 2013 — 728 million daily users, up 25% from 2012, etc., etc. — but one factoid stood out:

Approximately 80% of our monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.

Here is what the looks like as a chart:

 

Facebook

Users in North America have been basically flat since 2012. The U.S./Canada added only 2 million daily users last quarter.

By contrast, Asia and the Rest of the World is where user-growth is really moving the needle. The non-West added 20 million users in the last quarter alone — 10 times as many as North America. And as the non-West is so much vaster than the U.S., you can see that the ROW is where the vast majority of Facebook’s future growth will come from.

Currently, Facebook probably gets the largest portion of its revenue from the West. But in the future, that will shift and Facebook will become a much more African and Asian company.

In the U.S., Facebook is essentially tapped out.

So this is why listening to Western opinion about the health of Facebook is now essentially useless — Westerners are in exactly the wrong place when it comes to observing accurate anecdotes about Facebook.

The future lies in the East.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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