Facebook has no plan to open office in Bangladesh now

Dan Neary

FACEBOOK has no plan to set up office in Bangladesh at the moment and is rather pleased to serve the country through regional offices, said a senior official of the social media giant, dealing a blow to a government push that aims to persuade it to establish local presence.

“We have no current plans to open an office in Bangladesh. Our community is global but we don’t have offices in every country,” said Dan Neary, vice president for Asia Pacific (Global Business Group) at Facebook, in an interview in Singapore recently.

The current plan, however, does not mean that the company is not committed to the country, he said.

The comments, however, dashed, for the time being, the government’s attempt to convince the social media giant to set up its office in Bangladesh. 

In September, the government sat with Facebook’s high officials in Dhaka when it pushed them to establish the office. After the meeting, the government also said Facebook is willing to set up an office and appoint local representative.

In the last budget the National Board of Revenue (NBR) stipulated that all social media platforms set up an office in Bangladesh or appoint an agent to ensure 15 percent value-added tax and 4 percent advance income tax are paid to its coffer.

The size of the digital advertisement market in Bangladesh is about Tk 2,000 crore and almost half of it goes to Facebook, according to market sources. 

Without making detailed comments on Bangladesh’s decision to impose 15 percent VAT on the spending for social media campaigns, Neary said Facebook is engaged with relevant stakeholders and partners to comply with the new VAT regulations in Bangladesh.

He said Facebook has teams that are dedicated to Bangladesh. The teams sit in regional offices where they get resources and support they need.

The world largest social media company recently invited some journalists from 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific to its inaugural APAC press day event, where Neary also attended a session.

Neary, who has 20 years of executive-level work experience in the US and Asia, said Facebook is supporting local businesses to grow and helping Bangladeshi businesses achieve their goals.

“We are learning from Bangladesh’s SMEs and are investing in ways to help them attain their goals and contribute to Bangladesh economy.”

“We will continue to educate SMEs on how they can grow business on our platform,” said Neary, who worked for Skype and handled its marketing in the Asia-Pacific region before moving to Facebook.

Currently, Facebook has 2.45 billion active monthly users globally and the user base is expanding at 9 percent annually. It, however, didn’t share country-level breakdowns and also didn’t give details about the products Bangladeshi users are using the most.

Bangladesh has 33.71 million active Facebook users as of January, according to Napoleoncat, a research firm focused on digital companies.

Bangladesh has become a very important market for Facebook as already three crore users are connected with the platform and the company is earning huge amounts from here, Post and Telecom Minister Mustafa Jabbar said in August.

Neary said its mission is to give people the power to build communities and to bring the world closer.

“It is a mission that Facebook takes very seriously. We’re always looking for ways to support local communities to enrich their lives.”

Facebook is committed to digital literacy education in Bangladesh, the Facebook official said.

It partnered with the Unicef in Bangladesh in 2018 to launch an online safety campaign for children.

It has teamed up with Banglalink, the country’s third-largest mobile phone operator, under an initiative – New to Internet People Programme -- that has helped educate more than 1 million women and children in Bangladesh by helping them develop an understanding on the internet’s relevance in daily lives and how to use it safely.

More recently, Facebook joined forces with Banglalink to train women on how to participate in the digital world in a safe and responsible way through the “Learn More, be More” campaign.

News is also a key part of Facebook’s mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer.

“We care deeply about journalism and it is the future. That’s why we are focused on helping publishers build sustainable businesses and stronger communities around their important work,” Neary said.

The Facebook Journalism Project (FJP) supports quality journalism and news literacy and serves as a hub for journalists and publishers as they look for new tools to enhance news-gathering and storytelling.

Neary said the project works in three ways: Building Community through News; Training Newsrooms Globally; and Quality through Partnerships.

In its community-building efforts, Facebook invests in institutes that are dedicated to funding high-quality journalism and building sustainable futures for community-based news.

As part of newsrooms trainings, it visits newsrooms and offers online courses to train journalists on how to leverage social media tools to tell stories that matter.

And for quality through partnerships, Facebook directly partners with news publishers and non-profit organisations to combat misinformation, promote news literacy, fund new initiatives, share best practices, and improve journalism on its platform.

And most recently, Facebook News, a dedicated place for news on Facebook, was launched and it is now being piloted on a subset of people in the US. The platform gives people more control over the stories they see and the ability to explore a wide range of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app.