Business / Gadgets

Leader of Twitter on 'personal' China visit

By Shi Jing in Shanghai (China Daily) Updated: 2014-03-18 07:34

Ahead of his visit, Twitter denied it would be setting up a Chinese office anytime soon, as they don't want to "sacrifice the principles of the platform and the way we think users should be able to communicate in order to do so", Costolo told an interviewer in June.

Leader of Twitter on 'personal' China visit

Twitter shares soar 73% in debut

Is China the next big step for Facebook?

But even though Twitter has not officially entered China, the company still can make money from the Chinese market.

A large number of Chinese application developers are now using MoPub, Twitter's mobile advertisement platform. Lenovo Group Ltd is one of them.

Unlike Costolo, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has stated on numerous occasions the company's goal of entering China.

Twitter, however, has never expressed such ideas.

For a social networking and micro-blogging service provider such as Twitter, its user numbers are what it lives on, as it mentioned in a public note released at its initial public offering last October, saying "our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing our overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements."

Twitter also has displayed its ambitions in emerging markets. In December, it signed a contract with a Swiss mobile software company to offer cheap Twitter access to users of low-end tariffs and basic "feature" phones. The service initially will be rolled out to users in Latin America, Africa, Asia and India.

Twitter also introduced its simplified Chinese version in 2011. But it seems that the service was not that popular. According to statistics released by Colorado-based social media data provider Gnip, only 0.05 percent of the tweets sent in 2013 were written in Chinese.

But the juicy numbers released during Twitter's IPO showed it has 215 million monthly active users, 100 million daily users and sends 500 million tweets every day.