Weibo Thursday officially landed on Nasdaq

Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) officially landed on Nasdaq in Thursday, becoming the first Chinese social media to be listed on the global scale.

Today's U.S. stocks began trading in the afternoon, the stock price immediately pulled up, the plate was once up over 40%, market buying active turnover. The first day of Weibo closed, the shares rose 3.24 to 20.24 U.S. dollars, up 19.06%.

Mr. Chao, chairman of Weibo, received an interview with Fortune magazine before the opening of the U.S. stock market, following a summary of the interview from the Fortune website:

Fortune Magazine: Over the past few years, Weibo's quarterly losses have been widening, and will future losses continue to grow? When will this trend be reversed?

Cao Chao: We have been running the company for more than four years from the company's history, but in terms of performance, corporate revenues have been on the rise over the past few years. Given the opportunities and market competition we face, we plan to increase marketing spending to increase the number and participation of users and invest in product development to make products more advanced and different.

Therefore, we are planning to put in more funds this year and next, which will put greater pressure on operating margins. But for us, this is to create a larger scale, and when we do that we can create a higher profit margin. In the long run, margins will be much higher than they are today, but in the short term margins may fall.

Fortune Magazine: What is the biggest bright spot of Weibo business?

Cao Chao: There are many bright spots, for example, Weibo is a leading social media platform, with a large number of users and a high level of participation, and, more importantly, Weibo is becoming the leading mobile-end social media platform, which is where the future lies. As you know, everyone is turning to the mobile end, and China's mobile phone usage is growing rapidly. This will make us a huge social platform, especially on the mobile side, and we'll have a lot of advantages to develop new business models around the mobile side in the future.

For example, we are trying to build an e-commerce ecosystem and work with Alibaba (rolling information) group to launch the program.

Fortune Magazine: What are the respective accounts of the micro-blogging mobile and desktop-side businesses?

Cao Chao: In terms of usage, about 70% of daily usage comes from the mobile end. About 80% of revenue comes from advertising, including display ads and pay-per-view advertising systems. Display advertising revenue more from the desktop side, but in the results paid advertising revenue, 70% from the mobile end, 30% from the desktop side.

Last year, 28% of Weibo's overall revenue came from the mobile end. I think the mobile business will continue to grow and more revenue will come from the internal activities of the information flow.

Fortune Magazine: Have you considered postponing IPOs in recent weeks when the technology sector has been selling?

Cao Chao: I think we didn't talk about this market when we started this process, just happened. Obviously, this is not an ideal market for IPOs, but in terms of corporate history, we think the entry point of the IPO is sometimes challenging, but it doesn't matter in the long run. We have come here for a long time and believe that our size will continue to grow. The entry point only determines how much cash this transaction will bring to us, which is not the end goal we are considering, because we already have a lot of cash. More importantly, we want to be an independent company to build our own.

"Fortune" magazine: is Twitter compared to tweets that are good or bad for Weibo? After all, Twitter shares have fallen this year.

Cao Chao: There are many times when people use Twitter to compare with Weibo, they think we are the same type of company, but we do business in China. To some extent, the view is right, and two companies have a lot of similarities from product to feature to functional, but there are also big differences between the two social platforms. For example, compared with 140 English words, 140 Chinese characters can hold a much richer meaning, so the user behavior on the microblogging platform will be very different from Twitter.

We have provided the information flow multimedia function from the outset, and engaged in the mobile end business from the very beginning. In this field, we are actually the leaders of many innovations, and our products are more sticky. Compared to other social media platforms in other countries, we have a much greater influence in China. Microblogs are very different in terms of permeability and social impact.