LinkedIn opens Asia office in Singapore

SINGAPORE: Professional networking platform LinkedIn on Tuesday opened its regional headquarters in Singapore and plans to use the city-state as a base to expand its Asia-Pacific presence.

"We chose Singapore's location for a few reasons, one because its the regional hub for so many multinational companies, many of whom are already our customers on a global basis," regional managing director Arvind Rajan said at a media briefing.

"Part of the reason that we're moving out here is to also use Singapore as a hub through which we'll look at opportunities to expand physically throughout the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region," he added.

Singapore, with its business-friendly environment and choice geographical location, is popular as a regional base for multinational companies that want to expand into Asia's booming economies.

"From March of last year to March of this year, we grew 130 percent in APAC so we're seeing a really rapid growth already and we think that by having a presence here, by expanding our footprint in Asia, we think we'll see continued sustained growth," said Rajan.

The Singapore office will oversee sales, finance, marketing and human resource functions for the region and plans to expand into Japan later this year, he said.

The US-listed firm has more than 100 million members from 200 countries as of March 2011, with over 18 million of them from the region, a company factsheet showed.

LinkedIn is the second online networking site to set up shop in Singapore after Facebook inaugurated its Asian sales office last year.

It listed early this month on the New York Stock Exchange and is the first major US social-network firm to go public.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011