Sohu.com (Nasdaq: SOHU ) is already turning heads with the steady growth in its flagship Web portals and its majority stake in the red-hot Changyou (Nasdaq: CYOU ) IPO. Now the Chinese gaming company has turned in yet another market-thumping report.
Sohu's first-quarter profits more than doubled to $1.15 a share, as revenue climbed 36% to $115.7 million. Analysts were expecting earnings of just $0.99 a share on $113.3 million. The performance probably didn't surprise shareholders, though. They've seen Sohu top Wall Street's profit targets in each of the past eight quarters.
The real driver at Sohu is its online gaming business, which has soared 50% higher over the past year to gobble up more than half of the revenue mix. Sohu's brand advertising business inched 16% higher, and that's welcome news in a stale environment for marketers. Of course, it's also chopped liver next to Baidu's (Nasdaq: BIDU ) 41% top-line advance during the same three months.
Sohu successfully took Changyou public last month. The market debutante was priced at $16 a share and has more than doubled since then. Now that Sohu owns only 71% of Changyou, will it need to breathe new life into its bread-and-butter portals to resume its growth streak?
That's a fair question. Sohu is now projecting non-GAAP profitability of between $0.80 and $0.85 a share this quarter. Wall Street is perched higher, so this should be the first time in two years that analysts have to take down their guesstimates. Changyou's guidance for the current quarter is well ahead of analyst estimates, so the culprit for Sohu is either a projected slowdown in its online advertising business or the failure of Wall Street's finest number crunchers to accurately account for last month's partial spinoff.
Sohu's new guidance wasn't raining on the stock's parade this morning, because Sohu is still one of the cheaper growth stocks out there. It now trades for less than 15 times trailing earnings, and that's before we back out the company's cash-rich balance sheet. Sohu closed out the period with $373.2 million in cash equivalents, and it will receive net proceeds of $128.3 million as part of last month's Changyou IPO. Sohu is thus well positioned if it decides to buy its way out of its brand-advertising lull.
Plenty of online gaming companies in China are fetching low earnings multiples -- Shanda Interactive (Nasdaq: SNDA ) and Perfect World (Nasdaq: PWRD ) among them. Sohu, on the other hand, offers a more balanced play across several Web-based pursuits. That diversification has served the company -- and its investors -- well. It may not want to change a single thing.
Other games to play in China:
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