Recent UFC signings indicate and push to further engage Asian audience

There aren't many UFC events that take place in Asia and when they do they are almost always minor events such as Fight Nights. This is obviously because a majority of the money that UFC makes is from pay per view buys and this market is particularly profitable in North America. Therefore, it is understandable why UFC and other promotions would be primarily interested in the market that is on this side of the planet.

This might be changing though as UFC starts to focus more on the middle east and perhaps they are making a push into the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese markets in the future.

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In the recent round of contract signings for the UFC nearly all of the people on the list are Asian. There is only one person who isn't and that is Talita Alencar, who has already been a part of the UFC Contender series.

One of the more interesting signings in my opinion is that of Zhu Rong not just because his name sounds like "you wrong" but because he comes from Tibet, and as far as I know there aren't any other MMA fighters from this part of the world.

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I would imagine that UFC will have to be very careful about how they present Mr. Rong because China doesn't take too kindly for Tibet to be referred to as a sovereign nation. He has actually been involved with UFC in the past but didn't perform up to standards but seems to have gotten some extra motivation to do it right this time. He has been featured, apparently, in a show called "Road to UFC" which I have never actually seen.

Another interesting signing is Myktybek Orolbai of Kyrgyzstan and yes, I copy/pastad both his name and the name of his country. We don't see many fighters out of Kyrgyzstan and I do enjoy variety.

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Orolbai was a short-notice signing for a Fight Night that took place in Serbia on November 18th of this year, but he has received a much longer contract because he performed so well at that event winning by submission with a rear naked choke.

When I was looking through the list on MMAjunkie it was impossible to not notice that everyone is Asian. I would like to see UFC take an approach to that part of the world because they have a lot of untapped potential over there. It is quite difficult for Asians to get involved in UFC because of a lot of reasons but the main one being that they would have to have quite a lot of money to relocate their training camp to the western world where most of the fights end up taking place anyway.

Other than "The Korean Zombie" and of course Zhang Weili from China who is the current women's strawweight champion we don't really see a lot of names from Asia. For reasons that i don't really understand, I tend to root for Asians when they fight so this is an interesting move in my mind. For a long time most of the talent in UFC has been focused on North America and Brazil so it is nice to see UFC getting the rest of the world involved. Maybe we can start to see a truly global competition at that point.