Now you SINA (Nasdaq: SINA). Now you don't.
The unheralded dot-com pioneer continues to deliver healthy results, even as Sohu.com (Nasdaq: SOHU) is attracting the Summer Olympics buzz and Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) is carving the thickest slices from the paid-search market.
As a jack-of-all-cyberspace-trades, SINA is doing just fine. The company's revenue climbed 25% higher during the fourth quarter to hit $70.7 million. Earnings on an adjusted basis -- which backs out items like stock-based compensation and certain amortization items -- inched 35% higher to $0.34 a share. (Revisit SINA's third-quarter earnings here.)
SINA's results clocked in just ahead of where Wall Street was waiting -- analysts were expecting $0.33 a share in non-GAAP profitability on $69.1 million in revenue.
SINA's growth story remains the online-advertising gravy train that rolls through the company's assortment of news portals, search, e-commerce, and Web 2.0 properties. It's there that SINA's top line soared 40% higher to $50.1 million, now accounting for 71% of the revenue mix.
The rest of SINA's revenue pie consists mostly of the fading mobile value-added services market that once defined the company. That changed once the government began to regulate the entertainment being provided to wireless handsets. Then mobile carriers like China Unicom (NYSE: CHU) and China Mobile (NYSE: CHL) began to eat into the market by grabbing bigger pieces of the market than they were creating.
Wireless leaders like SINA and Sohu quickly diversified into other high-margin areas, leaving just a few pure players like KongZhong (Nasdaq: KONG) and TOM Online to battle for scraps.
In other words, growth at SINA's bread-and-butter Web business is humming along at a healthier clip than the overall 25% top-line spurt suggests.
SINA is looking for revenue in the current quarter to come in between $66 million and $68 million, also slightly ahead of analyst expectations. The profit picture is a bit hazy, as companies finalize their assessment of tax-code changes that went into effect this year.
SINA will be just fine. It found a way to thrive past the mobile crackdown. The tax man isn't going to slow it down now.
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