Sina Corporation Beats Revenue Expectations in Second Quarter

SINA Corporation, the company backing China’s popular microblogging service Weibo, reported its second quarter earnings results. Net revenue for the quarter was $533.1 million, beating expectations by $10.9 million despite a decline of 1% compared to the same period last year.

SINA’s advertising revenue also declined by 5% compared to the same period last year. However, the company recorded non-advertising revenue growth of 19%, to $99.4 million.

The company’s flagship product, Weibo, continued to grow its user base with MAUs increasing by 21 million to 486 million during the quarter while DAUs increased by about 8 million users to 211 million.

On the company’s earning’s conference call, they expressed their excitement about the potential of SINA’s micro loan financing business going forward. SINA CEO Charles Chao said, “And so fintech is an area where we see a lot of potential. So we always believed this is an area with a potential to grow. And we continue to believe that the company’s especially big Internet platform with the data, with the user traffic has the advantage in developing this business. So we have been doing this for a few years now. And I think we would continue to invest in this area.”

However, Chao also noted the importance of adhering to constantly evolving regulatory policies within the fintech industry, commenting, “On the other hand, that we can also, I mean make sure that we will – actually whatever we do, we’ll follow the regulatory policies and these are the two areas that we are very much concentrated on.“

SINA also mentioned their increased investment in autonomous driving company TuSimple, to the tune of around $90 million.