No plans to bring Facebook to China, says Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that he is in no rush to take his company public, or to brave the murky waters of the online Chinese market.

Zuckerberg, questioned during an interview on the US PBS network, said that China posed, “issues” and “hard questions” for Facebook. “But since, for right now, we’re not available, and we don’t have an immediate path to become available, these are not policy decisions we have to make.” Zuckerberg added that Facebook would test the waters with a public offering, but there was no immediacy to these plans.

“At some point I think there would be some discussion around what it would take to go there, and then we’d at that point have to figure out whether we were willing to do that.”

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook said, “China is not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.”

Sites are aggressively blocked by the aptly named “Great firewall of China“. This system blocks all users from accessing sites such as Facebook.

According to Zuckerberg, the China issue is “not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about now. A big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options.”

Questions regarding the rivalry between Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook were also directed at Zuckerberg. “There are real competitions in there, but I don’t think that this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.”

“Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook. But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple I see companies who are extremely aligned with us.”