Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU ) isn't the only one hogging all the fun in China's online advertising market. SINA (Nasdaq: SINA ) is doing a great job there, too, as it continues to shed its mobile-services skin.
SINA posted healthy third-quarter results last night. Net revenue climbed 15% to $64.3 million. Earnings soared 60% to $0.28 per share, up a still-sharp 31% to $0.32 a share on an adjusted basis. Analysts were looking for the new-media specialist to earn $0.28 a share on $64.6 million in net revenues.
The 15% gain on the top line deserves a little color. It resulted from a 40% spike in online advertising, partly weighed down by a 21% decline elsewhere. (Sounds like a continuation of last quarter.) Now that advertising makes up 71% of its revenue, glossing over the weakness in SINA's mobile value-added services division is entirely understandable.
Five years ago, cell-phone content was where all of the cool kids like SINA, NetEase.com (Nasdaq: NTES ) , and Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU ) feasted. That was before the government cracked down on the entertainment being provided. Then came mobile carriers like China Unicom (NYSE: CHU ) , realizing that they should grab a bigger chunk of the market they were creating.
These days, mostly small players like KongZhong (Nasdaq: KONG ) and TOM Online bet the farm on the wireless platform. It's just as well for SINA, because its Web business is booming. The market is growing nicely, even before the upcoming Beijing Olympics.
SINA is also not immune to copying pages from of the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) playbook. It's testing a revenue sharing option on its popular blogging platform. The trial run includes just 20-30 celebrity blogs, but it's really just a matter of time before SINA opens it up, the way Google's Blogger.com lets any rule-abiding blogger get in on its revenue-sharing AdSense program.
The company aims to generate $68 million to $70 million in net revenue during the current quarter. That's a sequential gain, but analysts are perched at the high end of that range. After slightly missing the top-line target for the third quarter, the market's initial reaction was to send SINA's shares lower.
That's OK. With $439 million in the bank, SINA can afford to wait. With high-margin ad revenue continuing to become a bigger part of the SINA story, I'd have to side with patient investors in seeing this one through.
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