Facebook’s Growing List of Worldwide Affiliates

Facebook has recently implemented a few revisions to their policy with regards to the way they handle your data, and this came into effect after a vote by the social network giant’s users. One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is now entitled to share your information with its affiliates worldwide.

This leads to the question of who exactly are Facebook’s affiliates – well there are at least 67 of them and they are spread out all around the globe. Facebook is a publicly listed company registered in the state of Delaware in the United States; however they have formed various other companies all around the globe for a few key reasons, one of them being to avoid additional taxes. For this purpose, Facebook has companies in Luxembourg and Ireland and they pass non-US revenue through their Irish company to avoid US corporate taxes. In addition to this, having businesses in various parts of the world entitles them to run local operations. They also use these companies to run their payments business. Many of the affiliates were formed in 2011 as part of Facebook’s move into the payments business. It is believed that they are likely looking to create separate companies for this business due to regulatory requirements that apply to companies handling consumer payments.

Apart from all these strategic benefits, the company also has other affiliates due to numerous successful acquisitions. A few interesting facts on Facebook:

• They have 40 offices in 27 countries;
• There are 67 Facebook Affiliates in 12 countries;
• They have 3 data centres worldwide;
• Facebook set up Facebook Lux in Luxemburg in 2009 to take advantage of the country’s favourable tax laws;
• Facebook uses Facebook India Online Services to provide support worldwide; and
• Facebook has 7 holding companies around the world.

Some of Facebook’s most popular recent acquisitions include Instagram for $1 billion, Face.com for $100 million, as well as Threadsy, Spool, Lightbox, Glancee, Karma, Acrylic Software, and Tagtile. The company is certainly expanding its operations all over the globe and they do so cleverly too.

This information was sourced from an extensive corporate registration directory as well as from other public and subscription sources. Since not every jurisdiction makes business registration information readily available, there are likely even more Facebook affiliates than those listed above. This gives us some sense of the extensive and rapidly expanding physical footprint of the social network.