20 million was the number of LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) users in Asia Pacific (APAC) last publicly announced. Just four months later, today, the figure has grown by 25 percent to 25 million. We were told that four million of the users originate from Southeast Asia. Singapore, though small, boosts about 700,000 members island-wide. The growth in Southeast Asia was likely triggered by LinkedIn’s recent language localization move, which provides users with LinkedIn in Indonesian, Bahasa Malaysia, and Korean languages.
There aren’t any plans for China so far, as Arvind Rajan, managing director and VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, said last week at coffee chat session at Startups in Asia 2012 (Singapore). But he did, however, shared that LinkedIn in China is growing as more Chinese are using the tool for hiring. There are more than one million LinkedIn users in China so far.
And for Japan, LinkedIn will have an engineering office specially for the Japanese language, which highlights LinkedIn dedication towards localization. Arvind explained in our discussion last week:
One of the things I’ve loved about LinkedIn is that we tend to be very entrepreneurial in the way we approach things. Growth has been impressive and exciting, especially in the APAC region.
India makes up the vast majority of the networks users in Asia, with over 13 million users, according to LinkedIn’s own ad tool.
Arvind Rajan, at our Startups in Asia event