Sohu's growing strength in video, search and other business areas

　　in the last quarter, Sohu's total income of 256 million U.S. dollars, a 29% increase from the same period in 2011, 13% higher than the previous quarter; non-US general accounting standards for Sohu net profit of 16 million U.S. dollars, down 65% from the same period in 2011, down 31% from the previous quarter.

In the conference call, Sohu CEO Charles Zhang admitted that over the past two years, Sohu did lose the competition of Weibo. But he also said that Sohu is a group structure, with a number of business. Through continuous mining of media and content, as well as enhanced interactive features, Sohu has increased its capabilities in video, search and other business areas.

In TV dramas and other video content purchase costs, Sohu CFO Yuchuyan said that the expected price will remain stable. It is now in an ideal state and no writedowns are expected in the future. Each episode of the TV series is expected to fall to 2011-year levels. At present, for exclusive episodes, the price of each episode is about 500,000 yuan, he said the price is very reasonable.

Yuchuyan said that the first half of this year, Sohu real estate channel revenue decline, but orders growth rate of about 25%. In the non-video advertising revenue, there is expected to be single-digit percentage growth. And the third quarter still showed single-digit percentage growth.

In terms of gross profit margins, Yuchuyan expects the search business to remain stable and the brand advertising business will rebound to more than 40% per cent.