发帖
雷达卡
China’s Weibo eclipses rival Twitter’s market capitalization （539 words）
By Louise Lucas in Hong Kong
-----------------------------------------------------
China’s Weibo is worth more than US rival Twitter, after a rallying share price drove its market capitalisation to $11.3bn, surpassing the US messaging platform’s $11.1bn.
Twitter’s share price dropped late last week after the company missed revenue forecasts and failed to deliver on hopes of a “Trump bump”. By contrast, shares in Weibo, part-owned by Alibaba, have been climbing on the back of a rising number of subscribers and its growing ability to wring more cash out of them.
Weibo came close to eclipsing Twitter when the latter’s shares tumbled in October when it transpired that rumoured suitors, including Walt Disney and Salesforce, had failed to materialise. This is the first time Weibo’s market capitalisation has risen past Twitter’s on a close-of-day basis, according to Bloomberg data.
While Weibo’s usurping of Twitter’s position owes much to the US company’s falling stock, the switchover comes as China’s technology groups are narrowing the gap with their western rivals on various metrics — and in many more cases are overtaking them in terms of offerings to consumers.
Alibaba, for example, is dwarfed by ecommerce peer Amazon when it comes to market capitalisation: $255bn v $395bn. But its net income of $2.47bn in the three months to the end of December put Amazon’s $749m in the shade and its business model, which via Ant Financial also encompasses payments, is much broader.
One area where some Chinese companies have lagged behind substantially is in monetising their subscriber bases, seen by many investors as leaving huge potential for growth. Subscribers to Moments, the Facebook-like news feed run by Tencent, for example, may see just one ad — a fraction of those shown on the US social network.
Nasdaq-listed Weibo, which has more than 340m monthly average users, is similarly behind.
Jialong Shi, internet analyst at Nomura, calculates that Weibo’s annual average revenue per monthly user of $1.90 in 2015 was a quarter of Twitter’s $6.50 and one-sixth of Facebook’s $11.30. These numbers continued to improve in the first three quarters of 2016, but are still well behind those of its US peers.
“The social platform ad market is very nascent in China,” said one Hong Kong analyst, who noted that it accounts for 8 per cent of the online ad market against 20 per cent in the US and is dominated by Tencent Moments and Weibo.
While Weibo has been dubbed China’s Twitter it is in some ways more akin to YouTube with a dash of Instagram thrown in. Videos and live streaming, much of it user-generated, are popular on Weibo, a reflection of the heavily youth-based audience, with 88 per cent under 33.
Twitter is blocked in mainland China, although still claims millions of users who access the site through virtual private networks.
Like YouTube celebrities, Weibo’s equivalents — known as wang hong or key opinion leaders — generate videos and other content that is avidly followed. However, China’s opinion leaders have grown in influence, driving growth and revenues for themselves as well as the platforms they use.
One analyst cites the example of Zhang Da Yi, a fashion model with more than 4m followers on Weibo who sells her own designs on Taobao, Alibaba’s ecommerce platform, a career change that pulled in $108m last year.
京公网安备 11010802022788号
