After continued growth in the Asia-Pacific market, American company Pinterest have opened a new office in Singapore. This complements their existing Asian office in Tokyo, Japan, which was opened in 2013. Pinterest's head office is located in San Francisco, but with millions of people using their services, it was important to them to locate staff within their Southeast Asia market. The office in Singapore, headed by Ayumi Nakajima, will manage their work in Southeast Asia, namely Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore, and India, two areas with huge amounts of recent growth.
Pinterest's product is a social media platform available on the web and on mobile applications, which enables users to ‘pin' - save and organise images from the internet. Aiming to create a ‘catalogue of ideas' and to provide users with lifestyle inspiration, the company has been a huge hit and has users all over the globe. In particular, their market in Asia-Pacific has more than doubled since 2018, with more than seven million different ‘pins' each day from the region alone. In particular, the company's data show that users in Singapore, India, Indonesia and the Philippines are fans of travel, fashion, food and home decor, and the company noted that ‘Durian recipes' and ‘Indonesian holidays' were two of the top growers in search terms in Singapore during the past year.
The company wants to provide a more localized experience for users, and this is why it decided to open offices globally, so that they can best understand the needs of each market. Nakajima will head a small team of Singaporean talent, currently of less than 10 employees, that will primarily build relationships with local brands and publishers. In the future, the office is set to grow, with more local talent to join the team. Already, the team has been working with local influential brands like Vogue India and Tastemade and Femina Magazine in Indonesia, and this list of local publishers is due to grow even longer in the years to come.
In 2018, Pinterest launched a partnership with MasakTV in Indonesia, with a six-week TV campaign taking place at the end of festival Ramadan, encouraging viewers to use Pinterest to save recipes for inspiration for breaking their fast. This campaign increased the viewership of MasakTV by more than 50% during the time it was running, showing just how powerful advertising on the platform can be for brands, particularly those who want to attract a female millennial and Generation Z audience. Pinterest generates revenue from the advertisements featured on the platform, and so their new base in Southeast Asia will allow them to best tailor these to their user-base. In recent years, Pinterest have also been adding local languages to their service, with language options including Hindi being rolled out on the platform in 2014, localising their product for the Indian market and others internationally.
This new move comes around three months after Pinterest debuted at the New York Stock Exchange, one of the latest tech companies to open its shares up to the public nine years after being founded in 2010. In the first quarter since it opened itself up as a public company, shares dropped by 19%, due to sales guidance and adjusted loss per share running short. In 2018, the company reported revenue of US$756 million, but with losses of US$63 million. However, with its carefully calculated decisions in 2019, this may be set to recover. International growth is one of the top priorities of the company. The office's lead, country manager for India and Southeast Asia, Ayumi Nakajima, has achieved much since she joined Pinterest in 2015, working from their Tokyo and London offices. Previous to this she had roles with Facebook and Nielsen.
The new office will be located in the centrally located and trendy Telok Ayer area, the perfect place to attract a talented group of local creatives, marketers and innovators to the company in the near future.