LinkedIn Launches in Japan, Poised for 20 Million Users in Asia

We all knew this was coming from news earlier this year, but we were a bit taken by surprise just now to learn that LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) held a press conference today to announce its Japanese launch as well as its new office in Tokyo.

The AP quotes LinkedIn’s head of operations in the Asia Pacific region, Arvind Rajand, as saying:

We think there are tremendous opportunities for growth not only in Japan but in entire region … If you look at LinkedIn’s business as a whole around the world, we feel we’re still just scratching the surface.

Arvind has a post on the LinkedIn blog today describing the news as well.

A quick revisit to LinkedIn’s own ad-generator tool (which we will assume is relatively accurate) shows that LinkedIn still doesn’t even have half a million users in Japan (418,848 users, according to our latest check). That’s a gain of about 50,000 users, since we last checked four months back.

As for the rest of Asia, India still accounts for the majority of the region’s users, with over 12,000,000 LinkedIn users. Next is China, with about 1.7 million. The total for Asia user count sits at 19,640,610.