By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
December 14, 2007
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Where's Bill Murray when you need him? It's starting to feel like Groundhog Day, with shares of China.com parent CDC (Nasdaq: CHINA) trading 18% lower this morning after the company posted a loss in its latest quarter. The exact same thing -- down to the 18% intraday decline -- happened three months ago.
This time, the carnage is more troubling. Robust gains in the company's enterprise-software stronghold found the top line inching 27% higher, but last year's meager third-quarter profit turned into a problematic loss this time around.
Remember when online gaming and the company's China.com portal were supposed to be the growth catalysts at CDC? You can forget about that for now. CDC's gaming revenue fell by 23%. The company blames the dip on pirated servers running its Yulgang multiplayer fantasy game and on a dispute with the game's developer.
Who cares? You don't hear larger online gaming specialists like Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) or Giant Interactive (NYSE: GA) bellyaching about piracy in China. Sure, it's a problem, but those companies happen to be growing too quickly to nitpick. Even the gaming companies that have hit rough patches lately, like The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY) and NetEase (Nasdaq: NTES), at least have their fat profit margins to help them ride out the storm.
The drop-off at China.com was a steeper 58%, but a lot of that is the result of the mobile content services that have dried up for the remaining players, including Tom Online and KongZhong (Nasdaq: KONG). Revenue for the China.com portal itself actually inched 14% higher during the period.
Then again, it's getting pretty ridiculous to refer to CDC as anything other than a corporate software company. It accounts for 90% of the total revenue mix these days. Sure, it was nice to dream of CDC as an Internet cafe darling and a dot-com heavy, but the reality is that CDC is a better player outside of China, where its enterprise-software licensing and servicing businesses are thriving.
Are you going to let investors down again in three months, CDC? Between now and then, please do something about rolling with a more telltale ticker symbol.
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