SINA (Nasdaq: SINA) is still growing, as long as you only focus on the new media darling's online advertising business.
Revenue in its latest quarter climbed 12% to $108.2 million, with brisk growth in the company's Web-based advertising business more than offsetting weakness everywhere else. Adjusted earnings climbed 65% to $0.50 a share.
Wall Street was settling for a profit of $0.43 a share on $103.2 million in revenue.
Despite a brief quarterly stumble earlier this year, SINA has been a dependable growth stock. It has landed ahead of analyst profit targets in 17 of the past 19 quarters.
The company's guidance for the current quarter isn't as inspiring. It sees online advertising revenue coming in between flat sequentially to a mere 2% uptick. The company's non-advertising business -- primarily wireless value-added services for mobile phone users -- will continue to slide.
Don't sweat the wireless decline. This business has been fading for years, and online advertising revenue now accounts for all but a quarter of SINA's revenue. Ever since the Chinese government began clamping down on the content available through mobile services and carriers began taking many of those offerings in-house, it's been a tough niche to crack.
SINA, Sohu.com (Nasdaq: SOHU), and NetEase.com (Nasdaq: NTES) were among the market's biggest winners in 2002 on the strength of China's wireless value-added services market, but all three have learned to move on. Sohu and NetEase are major players in online gaming, and SINA broadened its wingspan as China's leading dot-com portal with new online initiatives.
Its most buzz-worthy site is Weibo, a micro-blogging site that's being called China's Twitter. It managed to attract popular celebrities early on, and now has roughly 50 million users.
SINA also sensed an opportunity last year to combine its online real estate assets with leading agency E-House (NYSE: EJ) to form China Real Estate Information (Nasdaq: CRIC). It has a 33% stake in the venture.
Is SINA growing as quickly as paid search speedster Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU)? No, but it's also fetching a much lower earnings multiple. Given the potential of Weibo to continue to explode in popularity, SINA can climb even higher if it's able to effectively monetize the magnetic site.
So let's call this a Weibo wager, but coming from an online pioneer that has routinely impressed Wall Street with its fiscal performances. It has paid in the past to buy on the slips, and history may be about to repeat itself given its lackluster guidance.
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