Sina is an online media company for China and Chinese communities around the world. Sina operates four major business lines: Sina Weibo, SINA Mobile, SINA Online, and SINA.net. Sina has over 100 million registered users worldwide.
Sina owns Weibo.com, a Chinese version of Facebook - Twitter hybrid social network, which has 56.5 percent of the Chinese micro-blogging market based on the number of registered users and 86.6 percent based on browsing time, compared with other Chinese competitors such as Tencent and Baidu.
Although relatively unknown in the United States, the Chinese social networking service has more than 140 million users and millions of posts every day, and is adding 20 million new users every month. Sina has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other social celebrities. The top 100 users now have more than 180 million followers combined.
Sina.com is the largest Chinese language infotainment web portal. It is run by SINA Corporation that was founded in 1999 in the Chinese mainland. Its global financial headquarters moved to Shanghai on October 1, 2001.
Business coverage
As a website that mainly caters to the Chinese population around the globe, Sina has about 94.8 million registered users and more than 10 million active users engaged in paid services (10,000 of whom are overseas Chinese in North America). SINA.com provides different subsidiary sites around the world, for example there are 13 access points within Greater China, and subsidiary tailored pages for overseas Chinese, which include SINA US, SINA Japan, SINA Korea, SINA Australia, SINA Europe and SINA Germany.
SINA.com is one of the four major business lines of SINA Corporation. The other three are SINA Mobile, SINA Online and SINA.net.
Popularity In a survey conducted by Gallup (China) Research Ltd in April 2003, SINA was the most popular website in China. It is estimated that the site has about three billion page views every day. Also, it was awarded the "Chinese Language Media of the Year" in 2003 by Southern Weekend.
History In March 1999, Stone Rich Sight Information Technology Ltd (SRS), established by SINA.com's former CEO and President Wang Zhidong, merged with SINANET.com, a US website company from Sunnyvale, California. The merging of the two largest Chinese websites formed the SINA.com. Since then the service had been extended across the straits and North America, before it extended to Hong Kong in July 1999.
SINA.com overtook the dominant role of Sohu.com for the first time in 1999 by its fast, continuous, and comprehensive reports on the NATO Bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, according to CNNIC's survey conducted 2 months after the incident.
SINA.com was the first to be approved for listing on the Nasdaq National market on 13 April 2000, followed by Netease and Sohu, two other web-based companies in China. It succeeded in raising $68 million before Nasdaq plummeted in May 2000. In July 2000, SINA.com was the official website for on-line coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney as selected by the government and the Chinese Olympic committee.
Partnership Sina.com cooperates with other web-based companies such as People, Nanfang Daily, Lifeweek and Xinhuanet, etc. Its clients include Microsoft, DELL, IBM, Motorola, and Kodak. Recently SINA.com started developing its business in the field of wireless internet, while collaborating with China Mobile, China Telecom, Ericsson.
SINA.com and Yahoo.com also jointly provide online auction services in China; in response to this, EachNet, which cooperates with eBay, lowered its registration fee in early February 2004 in order to keep its market share.
Features Multiple services Sina.com provides Internet services to the Chinese population around the world. In every localized website, there are over thirty integrated channels, including news, sports, technology information, finance, advertising services, entertainment, fashion, and travel.
Sina.com is a multiple-service provider, its major services are SMS, Mail, Search, Games, Match, Entertainment, Sina Blog, Sina Microblogging and Sports. Sina Blog is the blog service of Sina.com, which features the blogs of celebrities, including the most popular blog in the world. Many celebrities are from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and also Hong Kong use Sina's Microblog as a platform to reach out to their fans and supporters. Some famous users on Sina's Microblog include Taiwanese hosts Dee Hsu and Kevin Tsai, with more than six million followers on their microblogs each.
Online News Sina.com provides a lot of feature news as the focus of the lead story or the main photo. On the other hand its domestic political news is sourced from The People's Daily or Xinhua News Agency. Compared to conventional medium for news distribution, Sina.com is a platform for news articles from traditional media. That means, according to its CEO, Wang Zhidong, Sina.com never hire journalists.
