Xu Liangjie Drops Sina Weibo or Brings Change

Yesterday (February 20th), Sina officially announced that former vice president of Cisco Xu Liangjie has joined Sina and appointed him as chief technology officer (CTO) and co-president of the company, in charge of microblogging business, and COO was promoted to the co-president. Du Hong. At the same time, Sina also released financial statements for the fourth quarter and the full year of fiscal year 2012. The report shows that Sina’s net revenue for the fourth quarter was 139.1 million U.S. dollars, an increase of 4% over the same period of last year; net profit was 2.4 million U.S. dollars, down 74.2% year-on-year.

At present, when Sina Weibo’s registered users have exceeded 503 million, Xu Liangjie’s joining has generally led the outside world to believe that it will inevitably bring about tremendous changes to Sina Weibo at the product and technology level, and will seek precise matching of data for Sina Weibo, and To some extent, it has accelerated the commercialization of Sina Weibo.

Or become a key figure in change

With the joining of Xu Liangjie, Sina executives also officially surfaced. Xu Liangjie will be responsible for the company's R&D center and will also manage the Weibo division. The company’s vice president, general manager of the Weibo division Wang Gaofei and general manager of the R&D center Fu Qingming reported to Xu Liangjie and Xu Liangjie reported to Cao Guowei. In addition, Wei Dachen, vice president of Weibo’s open platform division, continued to report directly to Cao Guowei.

For Xu Liangjie's joining, Cao Guowei said that Xu is experienced in managing technology companies and he is good at managing technology and product areas and has served the top companies in the industry. “Sina is transforming from a media company to an innovative and technology-driven product company. We are in great need of such talents with product and technology background. Xu Liangjie’s background is in perfect harmony with this demand. His joining will bring great value and hope. This will be reflected in Sina's future performance."

The well-known Internet commentator Xie Wen believes that in the past ten years, Sina portal business lacks innovation both in content and product. This is related to Sina’s previously unreasonable senior management structure. The biggest bottleneck of Sina's current development is product innovation.

This also means that Sina Wei needs a person who understands Internet products to take on important responsibilities, and Xu Liangjie is also considered by outsiders to be the key figure that led to Sina’s emergence outside of Cao Guowei and Du Hong.

IT commentator Cao Yueping believes that Xu Liangjie experienced the baptism of the entire industry chain of portals, payments, and communications. The resources and experience during this period are beyond the reach of others. However, in the face of the intricate and complex environment of Sina’s internal relations, Xu Liangjie’s ability to seamlessly link the former resource advantage with Sina Weibo, and to promote the balance of interests in Sina’s products has become a challenge.

Commercial Exploration Road in the Impact of Mobile Internet

Qin Su, senior consultant of Yuanjian Consulting, said that Xu Liangjie’s joining is actually another important weight that the board of directors has imposed on Weibo’s slow commercialization and the technical capabilities behind many of the downtimes.

In the past year, Sina Weibo accelerated the pace of commercialization through a series of measures such as rectifying the marketing market, launching a bidding ranking system, and recruiting large-scale grassroots grassroots, but the effect was not satisfactory. The financial report shows that Sina Weibo’s revenue in fiscal 2012 was US$66 million, with 77% from advertising and 23% from Weibo’s value-added services. The fourth quarter financial report showed that revenue from Weibo's value-added services increased by 65% ​​QoQ to reach US$7.2 million.

This also means that Weibo's new business model is still being explored, and how Sina Weibo has come out of commercial difficulties has become a key issue for 2013.

In this regard, Sina related sources said that most of the current Weibo advertising revenue is based on social media display advertising, its advertisers are mainly brand advertisers, launched in the fourth quarter of last year, based on microblogging information flow advertising system, also Still being tested, some customers are currently trying, and the goal is not to attract too many users or revenues, but to debug the system. The purpose of debugging is mainly to ensure matching accuracy and user experience.

According to the aforementioned sources, Sina is currently on the road to commercialization and is also "cautious" seeking balance, on the one hand to obtain good advertising effectiveness and rate of return, on the other hand does not cause too much impact on the user experience or damage. According to its disclosure, the above advertising system will not be open to advertisers until March this year. Based on this, Sina expects that most of Weibo's advertising revenue in the first half of 2013 will still come from display advertising.

According to "Daily Economic News" reporter, in order to promote commercialization, Sina Weibo has previously launched a payment system, and through cooperation with millet, Mercedes-Benz and other manufacturers, testing the socialization of e-commerce sales, and 2013 Sina will continue to explore Weibo's value-added services and commercialization of socialized e-commerce.

In the financial analysts' meeting, Cao Guowei stated that social e-commerce is a hot topic and is very suitable for Weibo and other social platforms, especially the so-called “flash purchase” model. Weibo allows a large number of users to participate in the dissemination of sales information. Sina plans to accumulate a lot of experience through experiments and try different forms of e-commerce.

"In 2013, we will continue to improve the user experience, expand the scale of Weibo's commercialization, and will also shift the focus of all our major product lines to the mobile Internet." In the earnings report, Cao Guowei once again stressed the core strategy of "mobile first". . Currently, 75% of Sina Weibo active users use mobile terminals to log in to Weibo.

Cao Guowei pointed out that mobile-end advertising is different from portal advertising in that mobile-side traffic is growing rapidly, and users' frequency of use is also higher than that of PCs. Sina’s micro-blogging advertising platform’s price trend is that Sina will maintain its advertising pricing on the PC. On the mobile front, pricing will show an upward trend due to rising demand from users for advertising. He believes that the increase in the price of Sina Weibo mobile advertising will begin to appear from the second quarter.

Qin Su believes that the business model of mobile Internet is still very immature and the revenue is far away. In this situation, Sina's gambling on wireless will lead to more fragmented resources for portal brand advertising.

Another obstacle for Sina Weibo's efforts to force wireless lies with Tencent’s WeChat. Cao Guowei stated that the average spending time of microblogging daily active users in the fourth quarter decreased slightly, which was largely influenced by WeChat.

Character background

Prior to joining Sina, Xu Liangjie served as the vice president of Cisco Global, and was also the only Chinese vice president of Chinese at Cisco's US headquarters. In addition, he served as the core technology director and chief scientist for Excite, the first generation Internet search engine in the United States; at the beginning of 2000, Xu Liangjie joined NetEase as a CTO and participated in the entire process of Netease's listing. Its responsibilities ranged from technology extension to operations, public relations, and promotion; Joined eBay and became the first Chinese Global Vice President in eBay's history, and founded eBay China R&D Center.