Amid a flurry of activity involving Chinese-language internet content and service providers, the leading internet portals in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan have joined forces to promote cross-border traffic flow.
Greater China Portal Alliance (GPCA) brings together Hong Kong’s Netvigator (www.netvigator.com), China’s Netease (www.netease.com) and Taiwan’s Kimo (www.kimo.com.tw). We will not be a single portal site, but we offer a single portal strategy, said Kimo chairman David Lu. Even though we are extremely well known in Taiwan, I doubt many people know of Kimo in Hong Kong or on the mainland. GPCA will greatly increase our exposure in those two markets, he said.
GPCA is not the first alliance between portal sites within greater China, but it is the largest as it combines the leading providers in each territory. Between them the three portals claim more than 12 million page views a day and expect to see this rise as a result of the alliance. We are confident that it will result in increased traffic to our specific sites, said Judy Inn, vice-president for mass consumer portals at Cable & Wireless HKT Interactive Media Services, which runs Netvigator.
China.com, which hopes to raise $64m with an initial public offering before listing on Nasdaq this week, and arch rival Sina.com, will be the main competitors to the new alliance as they both have their own portals in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan.
Sina.com has just released the results of a study conducted by the state-run China Internet Network Information Centre which showed traffic on the three sites of 2.82 million page views per day, more than half in mainland China. It also has a US portal for Chinese communities in North America, but this was not included in the survey. Prior to the release of the report China.com was claiming to receive a million page views per day, but gave no breakdown of the figures.
Another company which has been talking of a Nasdaq listing is Sohu.com (renamed from Soohoo.com earlier this year to stave off a battle with Yahoo). But chief executive Charles Zhang said recently he had no idea when it would stop losing money. A year ago the company was predicting break-even this year, but now refuses to make any predictions. Things are accelerating, things are happening faster than we expected. We have more expenditure, so the break-even point has been postponed. This is a game of spending money and how fast you can spend money, said Zhang. Sohu.com’s costs rose as competition from other sites forced it to add more original content such as news, sports, lifestyle and financial information to what had been a relatively simple search engine.
