LinkedIn eyes business opportunities in China

The sign up page of Linkedin.com is seen in Singapore, May 20, 2011.

BEIJING (Reuters) - LinkedIn Corp will seek out opportunities in China to capitalize on its massive user base even though it sees the market as complicated, a company executive said on Thursday.

LinkedIn, a professional social-networking-site, has a small presence in the country and is one of the few foreign social-networking-sites to still have access to Chinese Internet users. Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China.

"It (China) is a very competitive market," Arvind Rajan, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan at Linkedin told reporters on the sidelines of a conference.

"There are political challenges, technical challenges. There are a whole lot of things for us to go through. We are far away from making any decision. At this point, we are just here to explore the market, to talk to people.."

LinkedIn was also briefly blocked by China in February this year.

Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn allows users to create profile pages with a photo and details about themselves. But it is largely used for professional rather than social personas, and is basically an online database of electronic resumes.

LinkedIn shares more than doubled in their public trading debut last Thursday, evoking memories of the investor love affair with Internet stocks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

(Reporting by Xu Wan and Melanie Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)