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Source: Global Times
[01:52 April 11 2011]
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Boss of the domain

On Thursday last week, in a coffee shop in the Ideal building in Zhongguancun, Beijing, where Sina is located, several tables were occupied with Sina employees having meetings with clients. Weibo often came up during their conversations. "We are extremely busy with a new Weibo project," a spokeswoman told the Global Times. By the new Weibo project she meant a new independent domain at weibo.com. Last Friday the company officially started weibo.com, a very handy title, given that weibo is the Chinese for microblog.

Some observers say Sina is preparing to spin off the Weibo unit for an initial public offering. "It depends on specific business and market conditions, but launching the new independent domain and a spin-off are not related," said Mao Taotao, a spokesman at Sina. While he neither affirmed nor denied the possibility of a spin-off and IPO, he highlighted the market value of Weibo. "In December last year, Goldman Sachs estimated that Weibo was worth $720 million. On March 1, the value of Weibo was estimated to be $3 billion."

One very competitive foreign company is pulling away from the world's largest Internet market, but the competition among Chinese search engines seems to be unrelenting. Recently, national media such as Xinhua and People's Daily also entered the market with their own search engines, Panguso and Goso, respectively.

With its microblog backing up the company's search service, Sina's battle with Baidu for the market that Google left behind will be watched with keen interest.

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