The Shanda Shuffle

Shanda Interactive's (Nasdaq: SNDA) announcement that Shujun Li will step down as CFO next month to be replaced by Daniel Zhang may not seem like much of an event. The swapping of bean-counters happens all the time. However, Shanda is a foreign company, and any event surrounding the struggling online video game pioneer deserves to be shoved under the microscope.

Shanda had it all as recently as a year ago. It was China's dominant player in the booming niche of multiplayer online games, entertaining the youth of the world's most populous nation. But gamers have gotten fickle in recent quarters, turning to games from rivals like NetEase (Nasdaq: NTES) and The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY). That prompted Shanda to riskily offer some of its older games free of charge, in an ad-supported model that could have threatened the pay models if not for the company's declining relevancy in the marketplace.

Shanda has also been banking on the EZ Pod, a computer application that dumbs down the functionality of a home PC so that even couch potatoes without computing skills can quickly make things happen. With the Chinese market familiar with TV but just starting to warm up to computers, it could be a big winner for Shanda. The company recently announced that it would be teaming up with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) in China for digital applications on the EZ Pod. The problem here is that the market can't decide whether it should view the EZ Pod as a potentially promising revenue stream, or mark down Shanda for trying to take on too many different projects simultaneously.

A CFO shuffle may raise some eyebrows at first, but Shanda seems to pass the sniff test here. The departing CFO will remain on the company's board, and the new hire is actually the company's own financial controller.

For a company as challenged as Shanda has been over the past year, it's great to see a non-event actually get treated as a non-event. Now, where was I? Oh, that's right. A yawn.

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz believes in the sector, but he does not own any of the companies mentioned in this story.The Fool has a disclosure policy. Rick is also part of theRule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.