Chinese battle for microblog supremacy

Quoted from www.ft.com

In the autumn of 2009, when the Chinese web portal Sina launched its microblog, the new platform was barely noticed in the worldwide online cacophony. People were already sending more than 20m tweets a day on Twitter.

But while China may have had a late start, homegrown services resembling Twitter are now gaining such momentum in the world’s most populous internet market that they are bound to change the local industry landscape.

“There is a real war of the microblogs going on,” says Charles Zhang, chief executive of Sohu, one of China’s largest web portals and one of Sina’s fiercest rivals.

By the end of last year, 63m people, almost 14 per cent of the country’s 457m web users, had taken to microblogs, according to China Internet Network Information Center, the state web registrar.

Analysts estimate that number has more than doubled over the past two months as Sina’s microblog, called Weibo, hit 100m users alone by the end of February.

Half a dozen other Chinese internet companies run similar products, with Tencent and Sohu being Sina’s most serious competitors. All of them are thriving because Twitter is blocked in China. But the popularity of the tool means that those internet companies that have established themselves as main ‘homes’ for Chinese web surfers in the past are at risk of losing that valuable position.

That risk is clearest for Tencent, the world’s third-largest internet company by market capitalisation, which has built itself into a formidable social networking company through QQ, its instant messaging tool with more than 630m active accounts. Baidu, the company which runs China’s leading online search engine, could be challenged for its dominant share of the country’s online advertising market.

Read the full article at Financial Times here