WEIBO TALK: Lenovo Watches Super Bowl, Weibo Chastises WeChat

The Super Bowl may be the most watched TV program in the US, but it’s still relatively unknown in China due to the lack of popularity of American football. But the sport gained at least a few Chinese fans with its latest airing, as top executives from the likes of PC giant Lenovo (HKEx: 992) and online video firm LeTV (Shenzhen: 300104) tuned in to watch this year’s match-up that saw the New England Patriots defeat the Seattle Seahawks.

Meantime, an executive from the struggling Sina Weibo (Nasdaq: WB) was busy criticizing rival Tencent (HKEx: 700) for the latter’s freeze-out of several major Internet firms from its hugely popular WeChat instant messaging platform. Finally, we’ll end this week’s round-up of tech executive chatter with buzz that hints a former online literature pioneer may be preparing to emerge from a forced retirement, as he returns after a tough business battle of the sort that’s quite common in China.

Let’s begin with the Super Bowl, which was played a week ago and found a big fan this year in Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing. Of course we need to be fair and quickly disclose that Lenovo has been a sponsor for the last 2 years of the National Football League (NFL), which hosts the Super Bowl, meaning his attention to the game probably wasn’t motivated purely by personal interest.

Yang posted a photo of his team in a luxury sky suite at the game, though he also complained about how high the box was, making it difficult to follow the action on the field. (microblog post) He apparently even tried to track the game on the Internet, but again found the speeds were too slow for good streaming. (microblog post) All that effort does seem to indicate that he’s indeed a fan, even though the game doesn’t get much attention in China.

Meantime, LeTV chief Jia Yueting commented that the Super Bowl is more of a show than a sporting event for many people, which perhaps is why his his company chose to broadcast the match on its China-focused platform. (microblog post) Lastly there was Derek Shen, China chief of US corporate networking service LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) who got up early to attend a local Super Bowl party and revealed he’s a fan of the winning New England Patriots. (microblog post)

While the Super Bowl chatter was mostly light-hearted, a series of re-posts from Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) vice president Wang Gaofei against Tencent felt more like a rant against his company’s rival. China Internet junkies will know that Sina is the parent of Weibo, the fast-fading Chinese equivalent of Twitter that is raidly losing audience to Tencent’s powerhouse WeChat mobile messaging service.

Tencent was in the news for much of last week, after it took a series of steps that systematically kicked off several competitor products from WeChat, including offerings from e-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), as well as rival game developer NetEase (Nasdaq: NTES). Gao added his own comments to a long series of re-posts he made on the issue, and also criticized Tencent for taking a similar action last year (microblog post)

In a later post Gao became more conciliatory, saying that Tencent has the right to police WeChat to keep off companies that are abusing their presence on the platform. (microblog post) His conflicting emotions reflect the frustration that Sina and Weibo are feeling as they rapidly lose out to WeChat. Data released just last week showed that the overall number of microbloggers in China fell 11 percent last year, in sharp contrast to a 10 percent rise for mobile messaging users. (previous post)

Finally let’s turn to a post from the talkative but increasingly irrelevant Li Guoqing, whose company Dangdang (NYSE: DANG) was once China’s leading e-commerce firm but has failed to keep up with names like Alibaba and JD.com (Nasdaq: JD). Li’s post involves Hou Xiaoqiang, a former up-and-coming young entrepreneur behind the rise of one of China’s largest online literature companies, Shanda Cloudary.

Hou was doing quite well and Cloudary was set to make a New York IPO a couple of years ago, when a big group of his managers suddenly defected and opened their own rival company — a relatively common occurrence in China. Cloudary fell into disarray after that, and Hou was eventually pushed out and even talked of bouts of depression on his microblog.

Now Li Guoqing is hinting that Hou may be preparing a comeback. (microblog post) His post praises Hou for his earlier efforts, and it’s clear that Hou has become a consultant for Dangdang itself. That’s quite easy to understand, since Dangdang got its start as an online bookseller and still counts books as one of its leading businesses.

Perhaps Hou will return to work as an in-house consultant for Dangdang or someone else, or he may even get more ambitious and try to launch a new start-up. Whatever he does, I certainly wish him success, as he seems to be one of the more honest, hard-working and visionary entrepreneurs on the Chinese Internet. He got a difficult lesson in the realities of doing business in China with Cloudary, but may be able to learn from that and do a better job with his next effort.