Failure to follow smart-phone waves

Lead: The FT published a commentary this week titled "Renren is not able to keep up with the Chinese smartphone wave" (Renren fails to keep pace in race for China ' s smartphone users) The main reason for Renren's decline is the failure to keep up with the wave of smartphones and mobile internet.

The following is the full text of the article:

Renren's debut in the U.S. was called China's Facebook. At the time, investors were valuing everyone at more than twice times the price that Facebook traded in private markets.

Yet everyone's share price has fallen by Four-fifths since 2011, and investors are acutely aware of how fickle China's internet stocks are.

Chi Tsang, an analyst at HSBC, said: "Everyone was really a Chinese Facebook, but it hasn't evolved for two years." "While Facebook and Google are not involved in the competition for Chinese social networks, Chi Tsang points out:" Although we sometimes don't feel it, the Chinese market is really a very competitive and very active market. ”

Close the once rage game "Happy Farm" is a milestone in the decline of everyone's shares. At the highest peak, "Happy Farm" has hundreds of millions of users, but the user's interest fades away.

Analysts believe that everyone's decline is mainly due to its lack of timely access to smartphones and mobile internet waves.

"Everyone has been a leader in China's social network for a long time, but the problem is that with the popularity of smartphones, China no longer needs a PC-side social network," said Jiong Shao, analyst at Macquarie Bank Macquarie. ”

The Chinese are moving away from the desktop faster than Europe and the US, and Chinese handset makers are rapidly pulling down the price of entry-level smartphones in fierce competition. As a result, China's desktop Internet traffic is down 15% a year, while the number of smartphones is growing by 20% a year.

Renren has reached 54 million active users in the month of June this year, with 45 million a year earlier, the company said. But 80% of the users who access the site use mobile phones and flat-panel logins, which can be difficult to cash in.

Everyone predicted that revenues would fall 3% to 7% per cent year-on-year, below analysts ' forecasts. Recently, everyone's share price has been rising because of the sale of glutinous rice NET, the current transaction price of 3.38 U.S. dollars, still far below the IPO offering prices of 14 U.S. dollars.

Chen, CEO of Renren, said the group is not optimistic about the future of mobile advertising, but is developing mobile games, which he sees as "a huge untapped but highly fragmented market".

Everyone CMO Bill said that last year everyone spent a year developing mobile applications and are now actively promoting advertisers. He also said it was harder to run a real-name social network in China than to run an anonymous social network, but everyone focused on students, more stable than the broader web site users. Bill said: "In China, white-collar workers are not loyal users." We cannot predict which of the next Internet forms will rise, and they will immediately be drawn to the past and discard their original products. ”