The card was heavy on east-west duels: like the bantamweight Masakatsu Ueda of Japan versus the aging American Jens Pulver. But it ended with Shinya Aoki manhandling his Japanese compatriot Kotetsu Boku in the main event: a lightweight championship fight.

Cui said the possibility of a live, pan-Asian broadcast had influenced his decision to shift One F.C. events from Saturday to Friday: a night when, as the time zones would have it, there is a dearth of live sports events available in much of Asia.

“No Formula One, no E.P.L.,” he said, referring to the English Premier League, “there is occasionally tennis when you have Australian Open, but generally Friday is dead, the complete opposite of North America and most of the other parts of the world.”

In all, Cui said One F.C. has 12 events scheduled this year in six Asian countries, and Cui has announced plans to stage 24 events in 2014. One potential venue is the soon-to-be-completed 55,000-seat National Stadium in Singapore. Cui also has expressed a longer-range desire to move into the Middle East, including Turkey.





Other competitors

One F.C. is — unsurprisingly — not alone.

Other M.M.A. promotions are also organizing events in Asia, including Legend Fighting Championship in Hong Kong. Then there is the global leader, Ultimate Fighting Championship, or U.F.C., the engine of the sport’s rapid development over the past decade with its deep roster and its seven-year television contract with Fox Sports Media Group worth a reported $700 million.

U.F.C. is based in the United States but has had an office in Beijing since 2010.

“I think the sky’s the limit for the U.F.C. in Asia and, by extension, the sport of mixed martial arts,” Mark Fischer, U.F.C.’s managing director for Asia, said by telephone from Beijing. “It’s very new here, and in some markets still quite niche, but the growth so far has really been outstanding. Since we set up here about two and a half years ago, we’ve seen M.M.A. gyms popping up everywhere in all the major cities across Asia. We’ve seen a couple of smaller promotions pop up like One F.C. and Legend, and our own viewership has grown exponentially.”

And yet U.F.C. action on the ground in Asia has been nonexistent until recently. It has staged three events in the region, but two of those were in Japan and Macau in the last six months. And U.F.C. has tentative plans to add stops in Jakarta, Manila, Seoul and Singapore and perhaps other Asian cities in the next year.