Renren was enlisted 4th May 2011 on the New York Stock Exchange, their were the first social network (SNS) to be publicly enlisted, not mention to many of the U.S investors Renren is a foreign company operating a SNS in a country that even their mighty Facebook has failed. A month later as appreciation to the people who supported Renren through it’s years of hardships, a IPO Celebration Party was hosted in Shanghai, of which I was honored by an invitation.
By far the most surprising finding in Renren’s F-1 filing for IPO? After two years of lackluster growth (Dec 2008-Dec 2010), Renren claims explosive active user growth over the last 3 months to the end of March 2011. It claims to have added as many active users over the past 3 months as it did the previous two years (7 million monthly active users).
Could this in fact be a surge in Renren’s popularity?
Renren.com (人人网) filed F-1 for IPO to the U.S SEC on April 15, the first major step in the road to an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange as “RENN”. So how will Renren fare?
Renren is China’s largest real-name social network, created by Wang Xing back in late (December) 2005. It was initially a clone of Facebook called Xiaonei (校内), with college students as the main users just as Facebook was before opening to all.
Today Sina Weibo launched two new domain names (URL) weibo.com and weibo.cn (Open API Platform & WAP address), which should help Sina dominate the microblog market and venture further into social networking.
How? Weibo means microblog in Chinese (微博), so Sina is now literally in control of www.microblog.com for China. Sina’s major competitors, Tencent Weibo and Sohu Weibo, also refer to their services as “weibo,” so the new URL is a coup for Sina.
Charles Chao (CEO of Sina) and his 1000-employee strong Sina Weibo team is becoming a much more serious threat to Chinese SNS sites such as RenRen and Kaixin001 than Twitter ever was for Facebook.
DangDang, “the Chinese Amazon” (though without Amazon-style market share), listed on the New York Stock Exchange on December 9th, 2010.
Just over a month later, DangDang CEO Li Guoqing exploded at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse in a profanity-laced tirade, blaming them for a botched IPO that severely undervalued the firm.
In 2010, New York has welcomed 39 Chinese firms to its NYSE and NASDAQ stock exchanges, surpassing the previous record of 37 in 2007. 2011 could well obliterate all previous records, again. This post reviews the multitude of recent (5) and upcoming (9) Chinese internet IPOs.
