Foreign media predicts that Alibaba will acquire Sina Weibo within six months

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Alibaba Group, which has been imitating its American rival Amazon in business strategy, recently announced that it will acquire Youku Tudou (hereinafter referred to as "Youku"), China's largest original video website for netizens. Alibaba is acquiring the remaining shares as a shareholder. According to foreign media analysis, Alibaba may use the same strategy to acquire the domestic social network Sina Weibo or even its parent company Sina.

Alibaba Group has already entered the field of TV networking hardware, selling Internet set-top boxes. The acquisition of Youku will enable it to gain a foothold in the field of online video content and gain content chips for its set-top boxes and TV entertainment markets. This acquisition was expected by the outside world.

The US investment and financial website SeekingAlpha recently predicted that Alibaba is likely to acquire the remaining shares of Sina Weibo within half a year, using the same model as Youku, and turn it into a wholly-owned subsidiary.

The website even boldly predicted that Alibaba Group might even acquire Sina Weibo and its parent company Sina at the same time, thereby acquiring one of China's four major portals.

Among the three major Internet giants in China, Tencent and Baidu have already launched products for PC and mobile terminals in the field of news content portals, occupying a place in the market. However, Alibaba still has no presence in this field.

Back then, Alibaba acquired Yahoo China, a comprehensive news portal, but after several business transformations and repeated "turmoil", Yahoo China has withdrawn from the stage of history.

In 2013, Alibaba Group invested nearly US$600 million in Sina Weibo and acquired an 18% stake. At that time, Sina Weibo was valued at US$3.4 billion.

Alibaba Group's acquisition of Sina Weibo is no longer just a one-sided speculation of the media, but has also become the expectation of Wall Street and investors in the United States. After Alibaba announced that it would spend $4.5 billion to acquire the remaining shares of Youku, Youku's stock price soared by 22%, and Sina Weibo's stock price also soared by 13.4%, becoming the second largest Chinese concept stock company to receive this favorable increase.

Obviously, Sina Weibo's investors believe that the possibility of Alibaba's full acquisition is increasing.

According to data from the US stock market research firm, Sina Weibo's market value is $3.2 billion, far lower than Youku's $5 billion. As of the end of the second quarter, Alibaba Group held $23 billion in cash, so the acquisition of Sina Weibo does not pose a financial challenge to Alibaba.

After Alibaba became a shareholder of Sina Weibo, domestic netizens saw more and more Alibaba online shopping advertisements embedded in Sina Weibo, and Sina Weibo also became a new source of traffic for Taobao and Tmall.

From the time of investment to today, the cooperation between Sina Weibo and Alibaba Group has continued to deepen. On October 15, Sina Weibo announced that it would cooperate deeply with Ali Travel to provide more travel products to microblog users.

Sina is one of the earliest news portals in China. However, in the era of mobile Internet, Sina's competitiveness has shown signs of decline. Third-party data shows that the coverage of Sina News clients on smartphones lags behind the other three major portal competitors and non-portal aggregation clients. Various data show that the access traffic of traditional PC portals has begun to decline from the top position.

U.S. stock data shows that Sina.com’s current market value is lower than that of Sina Weibo.

Alibaba's traditional strength is e-commerce online shopping, but in recent years, Alibaba Group has begun to expand rapidly in non-e-commerce areas, and has also launched large-scale mergers and acquisitions one after another. Some Wall Street analysts also believe that Alibaba's expansion strategy in non-e-commerce areas has become confusing.

It is reported that Alibaba's non-e-commerce businesses are mainly concentrated in the following sectors: digital entertainment, logistics, Internet finance, mobile Internet services, cloud computing and IT infrastructure. Sina Weibo, in which Alibaba currently holds a stake, belongs to the mobile Internet services sector.