The following press releases and media reports about Chinese companies were carried on February 7. To view a full article or story, click on the link next to the headline.
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- Monster (NYSE: MWW) Sells ChinaHR to Irish Online Recruiter Saongroup (English article)
- Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) Launches Shopping Search (English article)
- NetEase Reports Q4 and Fiscal Year 2012 Unaudited Financial Results (PRNewswire)
- SMIC (HKEx: 981) Reports Q4 Results (HKEx announcement)
- Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) 128 GB iPad 4 Goes On Sale in China, Retails For 6,088 Yuan (Chinese article)
Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) and Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU) are kicking off the China Internet earnings season with results that don’t look particularly exciting but do appear to show some early signs that China’s collapsing advertising market may be near a bottom. If that’s the case, look for the situation to stabilize and start to rebound as early as the second quarter for advertising-dependent firms, perhaps providing a good buying opportunity as spending starts to pick up around the middle of the year.
The unspoken war between online search leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) and challenger Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU) is taking on a new wrinkle with word that Baidu may be trying to get its advertisers to stop using Qihoo’s popular web browser. I personally find this war of words quite entertaining, though I do also think that Qihoo could better spend its time focusing on doing business rather than accusing others of trying to thwart it through this kind of underhanded tactic. Qihoo, after all, is the master of the underhanded business tactic, which has resulted in numerous lawsuits and complaints being leveled against the company over the years.
When is a 24 percent drop in net profit a good thing? The answer to that question should usually be “never”, but in the case of online travel agent Ctrip (Nasdaq: CTRP), the company’s latest drop in quarterly profit appears to be encouraging investors that a recent round of price wars in the sector is starting to ease. That would be good news not only for Ctrip, but also for rivals like eLong (Nasdaq: LONG) and up-and-comers like Baidu-invested (Nasdaq: BIDU) Qunar, which have been engaged in a stiff battle for market share for much of the last year.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but a lot of Chinese Internet firms suddenly seem to be engaged in a series of major reorganizations. I came to this conclusion after reading this morning that Suning.com (Shenzhen: 002024), one of China’s top e-commerce firms, has just undergone a major structural reorganization as part of what the company says is a regular exercise. (
I quite admire scrappy smartphone start-up Xiaomi for its savvy marketing tactics, but I’m beginning to have doubts about some of its more strategic choices after reading about its latest tie-up with the stodgy China Central Television (CCTV), China’s dominant state-run TV broadcaster. Xioami is in a challenging place in its development, as it tries to make the transition from a niche maker of low-cost, high-performance smartphones to a more mainstream company with a wider range of product and service offerings. The company in many ways is trying to follow in the footsteps of its idol, US tech giant Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), which also has made the transition in the last 5 years from a relative niche player to the world’s biggest tech company.
The headlines have been buzzing this week with word that Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) could soon form a tie-up with software maker Kingsoft (HKEx: 3888), with many speculating the move by China’s leading search engine would be a direct assault on recent Baidu nemesis Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU). But a far more interesting possibility in this potential new tie-up would be a future related deal that would bring together Baidu with the up-and-coming young smartphone maker Xiaomi, whose co-founder Lei Jun has strong ties with Kingsoft.
