Olive oil from Spain directly sold and shipped to China consumers (Tmall Global)
After the grand opening of Correos cross-border shop on Tmall global in June, our team did a purchase and tested the shopping experience. Here, we will share what is it like to purchase in Correos cross-border shop:
First of all, the brands sold in Correos shop are mainly famous local Spanish brands and have not registered in China yet. Therefore, these brands joined together and sell to Chinese customers in this novel model.
After searching in this shop for a while, we decided to purchase a box of olive oil as Spanish olive oil is known with high quality and good taste.
Then, we started chatting with the customer service to ask for more details of this product. The shop sales replied us immediately. He told us the Correos cross-border shop has a local office in Hangzhou, China, however, all the products are in Spain and will be shipped directly from Spain to China. He also told us that lead time is within 3 days and the delivery time is around 7-14 days depending on various factors such as weather, traffic etc.
After all, we still decided to purchase this product and decided to pay and check out. There is personal cross-border purchase quota. We advise you to check it in here http://ceb2pub.chinaport.gov.cn/limit/outIndex before you make any purchases. Then, the buyer required us to submit a scanned copy of our ID, which will be used in the customs to clear the goods at the border.
Due to the long shipping distance, the shop does not take return merchandise. For testing, we finished payment and received a tracking number, which we can use to track our package online. For our order, we found out that the lead time is 2 days. After more than one week’s waiting, we finally received our olive oil 10 days after departure. Compared to our previous shopping experience on Tmall domestic, it feels slow but still within the time range they promised.
Unfortunately, our products exterior package is a little bit deformed probably due to the cushion put inside the package box is not enough. We sent a complaint to the customer service of Correos cross-border shop immediately.They were also sorry for this and decided to compensate 20 RMB to us.
In general, we have a very satisfying purchase experience on Correos shop on Tmall global except for the relatively long waiting time.
Chinese traveling user generated content platforms: Mafengwo vs Qyer
” 世界那么大，我想去看看 ” ( There is such a big world that I would like to see it all ) is a sentence once written as the reason for resignation and later suddenly became a buzzword on Chinese social network.
These years, more and more Chinese prefer independent travels to package tours. Especially, the grown up 90s generation, who are highly individualized and strong-minded, has become the main E-consumers of those traveling user generated platform such as Mafongwo and Qyer.
For example, Miss Xian, a traveling platform user from the 90s generation living in Guangzhou, China, gave up package tours for more alternatives a couple years ago. She had already stepped in South East Asia, America and Europe. Her preference is well organized in-depth trip with her family. Since her husband is too busy to do the planning, Miss Xian is responsible for handling it all. “Every time I am planning for a trip, I need some suitable travel platforms which offer practical and comprehensive reference for my destination. These years, I have been using mostly Qyer and Mafongwo interchangeably.” she said.
WHAT ARE MAFENGWO AND QYER EXACTLY?
Mafengwo : A Dream Realizer Started With A Community
In 2006, Chen Gang and LV Gang who worked in Sina and Sohu respectively set up this online travel community for their interest in traveling around and sharing travel pictures. 10 years ago, when independent travel was still a niche, mafengwo.cn accumulated users and contents through word-of- mouth. In 2010, they officially started commercializing mafengwo.cn. Apart from traditional OTA mode, they wanted to earn profits from existing contents directly.
By 2017, mafengwo.cn has gained over 100 million members, 80% of them are from mobile apps “ Mafengwo Independent Travel “. By Oct. 2016, according to the second quarter financial results of OTAs (Online Travel Agency) , Ctrip, Qunar, Tuniu, the top OTAs in China, were all in varying degrees of financial loss, while mafengwo.cn announced a turn from loss to profit eventually.
Nowadays, mafengwo.cn has become an UGC (user-generated content) platform where Chinese can share photos, travel notes, journals and Q&A online. It targets Chinese domestic users and independent travelers who need tourist reference, destination ranking lists and other recommended to-do things for their trip planning. Right now, 3,000 journals, 5,000 Q&A, 10,000 comments, 100,000 footprints are generated daily.
Moreover, it integrates resources contributed by users to make travel advice books among global destinations. Those books have been downloaded over a hundred million times.
Qyer : A Digital Bible for Chinese Backpackers
There are many other similar small-sized UGC communities in China market but a well-known competitor within Tourism Community category is Qyer.
At the very beginning, Qyer was set up by Xiaoyi in a dorm room. He was an international student studying in Hamburg, Germany in 2004. Once, after he got stolen at the airport while he was traveling in Europe, he became a real backpacker with very little money to survive. Then, he set up Qyer as a forum to better help oversea students share their experience, advices and wise tips of saving money during the trip. Then, Qyer started accumulating useful tips on the platform and became more and more popular in China. Within four years, Qyer had gained more domestic than oversea users. Therefore, Qyer moved back to China in 2008 and received strategic investment from Alibaba in 2013.
Right now, Qyer aims at making oversea traveling more convenient and cost-effective for Chinese. Meanwhile, it does offer information for domestic destinations but these contents usually do not show up on its homepage.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MAFONGWO.CN AND QYER?
The intriguing fact is mafengwo.cn and Qyer seem to intentionally keep in balance in the market. Mafengwo.cn puts more effort on domestic traveling, while Qyer mainly focus on travelling abroad. There is even a viral saying among the users: “Choose Mafengwo in-bound, Qyer out-bound”
In conclusion:
Traveling users generated content platform is difficult to develop and gain profit. It requires long-term user loyalty and content accumulation without guarantee for commercialization. But the potential of the UGC-big data commercial mode has already headed above water. With the huge amount of contents generated by users such as different links between accommodation reservations, attractions and dining recommendations, these data value mining is essential for breaking the barrier upstream and downstream. The one that’s faster to complete model transformation will be the winner.
Comparison/Platforms |
Mafengwo |
Qyer |
Traffic & loyalty |
More traffic and relies more on search engine optimization (SEO marketing). |
Less traffic but more users’ loyalty since the demand frequency of overseas traveling is less than domestic traveling.Qyer’s strategy is based on a “members get members” type of expansion. |
Targets |
Both target youngsters between 18 and 35 who prefer independent travel. Qyer also targets backpackers. |
|
Focus |
Mafongwo.com focuses on users sharing by creating topics and activities to encourage users to post their journals |
Qyer emphasizes user-to-user communication by operating its forum and offering appealing interactive promotions both online and offline.For instance, Qyer has already launched Q-homes in Chiangmai (Thailand) and Tokyo (Japan), which are offline bases offering Chinese-speaking comprehensive services. |
Functions |
The main functions are similar. They both offer travel journals, tips books, Q&A, top destinations and commercial functions.But Qyer has developed several apps for users convenience, such as ” 行程助手 ” (Itinerary Assistant), which helps users to make a detailed itinerary by automatic generation and manual setting. It collaborates with Booking.com( a hit for overseas accommodation reservations) for users to simply add reservations in the itinerary or book directly from Booking.com. Transportation settings and automatic distance calculation are also included in the sites. Moreover, it provides 2 ways to output itinerary: (1) A document fits with Visa requirements (2) A huge PDF itinerary books including all the photos or tips, details of each chosen accommodation reservations, transportation, attractions and restaurants. |
|
Home Page quality |
Update more often |
Update less often and there are even some journals from last year. |
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A Cashless wind blowing in the Fashion world in China
Recently, Wechat Pay and the leading fashion retail group Inditex have reached agreement on collaboration . 7 brands of Inditex: Zara, Bershka, Pull and Bear, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius, Oysho and Zara Home with around 600 offline shops in China mainland announced to access WeChat payment formally.
Since then, it will no longer be necessary for customers to bring cash while they are shopping in these stores. They can now pay by scanning QR code through WeChat payment, enjoying the ” no cash ” convenience in Fashion shopping.
By the beginning of 2017, the amount of purchases in fashion industry through WeChat Pay had attained a year-on-year growth of 9.5 times. The fashion industry became one of the most rapid growing industries. So far, except for Inditex, WeChat payment has also covered Lane Crawford, Longchamp, UNIQLO, H&M, GAP, Hot wind, Meters Bowne and etc.
At the same time, in this cooperate Inditex group, a new promotion activity has been carried out —— Random cashback + Cash coupons.
Activity Details :
- From June 10 to June 15, customers using WeChat Pay to pay more than 10 RMB per purchase in one of Inditex designated shops can get a random price cut up to 300RMB.( Each customer has maximum one chance of the price cut ) During the weekend ( June 10 to June 11) after 6pm, customers can also get one random red envelop bonus . ( Each customer has maximum one chance of getting the bonus each day during the weekend )
- From June 16 to June 19 , customers using WeChat Pay to pay more than 10RMB per purchase in one of the Inditex designated shops would have chances to win 5 RMB coupon. ( Each customer has maximum one chance of getting the coupon. Coupons’ valid duration is June 2- to July 3.
- The quota of price cut is 240,000. First come, first served.
- The quota of coupons is 80,000. 20,000 quotas for each day. First come, first served.
By outputting developed business solution to push forward the industry transformation, WeChat Pay will have more cooperation with more fashion brands in the future.
[divider style=”single” border=”small”]If you have any questions about selling in China, Contact us!!
The Spanish postal service, Correos, launched its Tmall global shop
Recently, Spanish post office Correo launched its oversea flag shop on Tmall global(an online B2C platform under China Alibaba Group) and started the trial operation. All the products sold in this flag shop come from major local brands in Spain and will be directly sent from the Spanish local brands’ warehouse to China.
Last year, Alibaba’s Cainiao network announced the strategic collaboration with the Spanish post office Correos which significantly push forward the cross-border business and logistics services. After the flag shop is established, the delivery will be very convenient and fast. A staff working in Correos said “All the brands shown up in our flag shop are selected through deliberate consideration.” Since Correos has major advantage of its domestic logistics service in Spain, it only takes 7 to 14 days for Correos to deliver the products from the warehouse, transfer them to EMS and finally arrive at buyers’ designated address. Buyers can track the information on both Correos and EMS websites.
The brands in the Correos flag shop include:
- Oleocampo: a high-end olive oil made in Spain
- Colnatur: a protein powder brand with protein powder products suitable for both sports fitness people and middle aged people.
- ART: a Spanish fast fashion shoe brand
- Neosens: one of the high-end shoe brand from La Rioja, Spain
- Marques de Grinon: one of the high end Spanish wine brand
- Correos: main products are stamps and commemorative coin collection
However, Correos is not the first foreign country’s postal service company that launches Tmall global shop. UK’s Royal Mail, Australia Post and Northern Europe’s Post Nord have already had their Tmall global shop online.
Alibaba high-end membership APASS, what the luxury brand needs to know
September 9th was Alibaba’s APASS Day
Red carpet, hot girls and boys dressing up, while this is not a movie award ceremony, it is the first APASS off-line anniversary event held by Alibaba recently in Shanghai. They also invited Martha Lahti, SKII, Estee Lauder and many other international brands to join.
At this event, Alibaba Chief Marketing Officer Dong Benhong first revealed the level of APASS spending: “Based on the current membership size, these APASS members spend at least 30 billion RMB of their net purchases each year.”
Who is this group of people?
According to Ali group customer experience drive and Innovation Center General Manager Wang Hai, he said “APASS members are mainly trendy mothers, business elites, online shoppers and business generation”.
Here we have some examples. Zhang Yixin is a freshman in college. She spent 1 million last year on beauty products, jewelry and other luxury goods to simply just dress herself up.
Wang Ruoxi has 12 years of experience on Taobao. She would spend 800 thousand to buy luxurious watches and many other pricy goods including exorbitant Martha Lahti. Last year, she bought 16 brand-name handbags on Taobao. Right now, she makes her own skin care brand on Taobao’s line and transitions into a seller from a buyer.
In addition to our “super-chop type” buyers, Zhu Rongfei, one of the APASS members, is a “collection type” buyer. She bought more than 300 sets of Lego Limited Edition toys online as she is a maniac Lego fan.
What is APASS?
This lavish style of spending has made them gain the Alibaba Passport, also called APASS. It is an exclusive rewards program and a combination of Facebook, Amazon Prime and the American Express Black Card. Its 100,000 members get unusual perks in daily life such as abnormally good deals on trips, free return of products purchased online and considerate personal service. Meanwhile, they are also encouraged to join online communities of shopaholics who blog and talk up Alibaba.
When Zhang Yixin mentioned the APASS membership service, she spoke with excitement: “What moved me most was that once, just right before an important show I had the next day, I lost my dresses that I was going to put on. The exclusive customer manager managed to find a seller in the city at night and got me the dress in time. It was amazing.”
What luxury brands should know about APASS?
If luxury marketers doing business in China want to understand Chinese consumers better, they need to pay for professional market research agencies to do it. The APASS program offers a shortcut for brands to achieve this goal. It not only allows them to gain insight into their potential consumers, but it also shows them who they should target directly.
Even though it remains ambiguous whether APASS truly has what it claims to offer to luxury brands in China, brands such as Louis Vuitton, Ocean glasses, Antonio Banderas Guerlain, and Maserati are already among those who are beginning to test out what the APASS can reach.
If you need help to sell in China, contact us!
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New Trends of Chinese Consumers
After being awakened by the influence of the western modern lifestyle, and the material richness, the Chinese consumers have more confidence now. The Chinese consumers’ patterns and consumption behavior are changing significantly these year. Let’s check around the new trend of Chinese consumers.
- To be distinctive / unique
Cenozoic consumers are not satisfied with popular brands only. They are looking for more customized / personalized products to make themselves look different and unique. That’s why the special-interest brands are growing rapidly recently. These brands usually have their creative products which meets the unique demand of specific consumers. More importantly, these brands help consumers to realize their dream of being distinctive and unique.
- To express, to share, to transmit
Chinese consumers have strong will to share (no matter it is their selfies, or daily life update, or the products they purchased) especially on Social Media which is a manifestation of self consciousness. Various Social Media platforms provide Chinese consumers with a channel to showcase their lifestyles, taste and opinions. Behind the motivation of showing their unique opinion or taste, there is a purpose to gain the social identity as well.
[logos]
- Increasing attention and concern about health
Chinese consumers concern a lot about “Eating”. The attention and concern about “Healthy Food” is keeping increasing these years, such as water, juice, diary products. Consumers’ awareness of health is growing and they are willing to pay for the healthy food with good quality. Therefore, in order to cater to the consumers’ demand, more and more brands upgrade their products and adding the “Healthy” concept as much as possible.
- Convenience is the king
“No time” has been the pain of today’s consumers. They are too busy to struggle between workplace and home. Today’s consumers are willing to spend money to get themselves free from those boring, repetitive daily activities. The numerous door-to-door services have spoiled most consumers by eliminating the time and troubles and increasing the convenience.
- Cross-border Shopping
Chinese consumers are now turned out to be global shoppers. As Chinese government launches more policies and regulations of Cross-border e-commerce, the picture of it has been more clear now. Besides the luxury products, the electronics household appliances, mother and baby products, and other daily necessities have been listed on Chinese consumers’ shopping list now.
Chinese mother & baby industry is booming
A Glance Embraced the Consumers of Mother & Baby Products
Mother & Baby industry is well-known as a “sunrise” industry, and with the full liberalization of China’s second child policy, the birth rate of Chinese children will face ushered in a new peak, bringing prosperity to mother and baby industry. Instead of talking about the macro market and the brands perspective, let’s take a glance from the point of view of consumers today.
2016 Mother & Baby Products Consumption Ranking Per Capita (RMB)
The avg. monthly spending on Mother & Baby products is 3,000 RMB. In Yangtze River Delta Area, the avg. spending is 5-10% higher. Many mothers spend 1,000 to 2,000 RMB more for their 2nd baby than their first one.
The buying time for those mothers with 2nd child is different from shopping for their 1st kid. In general, mothers start purchasing products 4-5 months in advance when they are with the 1st child. However, for the mothers with their 2nd baby, they are concentrating on purchasing in the last month of their pregnancy.
The online platforms and offline vertical shops provide more purchasing channels to mothers to buy proper products for their babies. It is feasible to pick up the products offline after ordering online as well.
The richer purchasing channels, the diversity of products, consumers start taking initiative to search and research products are the reflections of the consumption upgrade of Mother & Baby industry. These are the reasons why the industry is getting more and more mature in China market now.
2 OPEN can help you to enter the Chinese market through Ecommerce and Digital Marketing. Contact us to see if we can fit your needs.
Source: CBNweekly
Why WeChat is the best marketing platform for your brand in China?
Wechat is a key tool in China. Get t know why
10 Things you Need to Know to Build a Chinese Website (Part 2)
In the first part of this article, we showed and identified 5 main points that differentiate a Chinese website from its western counterpart that we need to keep in mind in order to build a good one.
Let us summarize some of the main points addressed in the previous article:
- The style, design and structure are more complex and with much more information in opposition to the cleanness of the western websites
- In terms of user experience, Chinese are used to a great amount of links and keyword search boxes are the kings for navigation purposes
- Where to host your Chinese website is one of the first decisions to make. The most of the times we advise you to have a hosting in China. For that you will need a Chinese company to apply for an Internet Content Provider (ICP License)
- The Chinese Great Firewall blocks all websites that do not meet the content requirements that marks the Chinese government
- Your website needs to be ready to integrate with the main Chinese players. Google, Facebook and friends are banned in China; instead you will need to use the BATs (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent).
After this little updating, we would like to further develop this post showing you 5 more crucial things to take in consideration when building a good Chinese website.
When building a chinese website, What else should I know?
6 – CHINA IS MOBILE. BE RESPONSIVE
Adapting our website to mobile is very important in any country, but in China is mandatory.
The Smartphone is, in many cases, the only way they have to access the Internet. Therefore Chinese users are much more familiar with the use of mobile devices. Keep in mind that almost the 50% of all Ecommerce transactions made in 2015 were done via mobile, compared to the also quite high 22% in the United States.
Don’t think any longer and start working on a nice mobile design… Mobile first!
7 – DOMAIN. WHICH ONE IS THE RIGHT OPTION FOR ME
In your approach to domains, three are the main options:
– Not that long ago, to have a .CN was a must. It was not possible to get it if you didn’t have a Chinese legal entity. This has changed over the time and now you can easily get a .cn domain, no matter where your company comes from, just providing a copy of your Company’s ID. As the Chinese international top level domain, your brand might be perceived as having a strong presence in China and might also bring some trust
– On the other hand, we have the .COM domain. Chinese Internet users are increasingly getting used to this domain. Major Ecommerce platforms like Tmall.com, JD.com or Sunning.com may bear much of the blame for this. It can be very good for foreign companies trying to sell their products in the Asian giant to have a .com domain as it might help to highlight the international feel of the brand
– .COM.CN is the ugly duckling in the middle still in use by many brands mixing the good things from the previous mentioned domains, but without reaching their full advantages. In any case it can also be a good solution.
Which language should I use?
Another point to think about is the language to be used. Does your brand have a Chinese name? Then you can also use its pinyin term. Pinyin is the romanization system for standard Chinese: Chinese search engines recognise the pinyin words in the URL and then link them to what they stand for in Chinese characters in order for the website not to lose coherence.
Our advice?
Don’t get crazy about the domain, they are usually not that expensive. So, in case you can afford it, try to get the three of them (.com, .cn and .com.cn), plus their pinyin variants and redirect them to the main one; depending on your strategy.
8 – CONTENT. DON’T GET LOST IN TRANSLATION
It is important to know very well your main target markets as the language will differ depending on it. It might be obvious to mention it, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a company’s target consumer is in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macao and the language used for the website translation was simplified Chinese instead of traditional Chinese and the other way around. That is a major and silly mistake that takes a long time to revert.
I don’t want to mention either the fact that a Google translated web does not help at all, but I am doing it because I have seen too many. It is mandatory to let a professional team take care of the translations. In 2 Open we separate this process in three parts:
- Translation, interpreting the main message that the customer wants to transmit to the final customer, done by a marketing professional in our team
- External review, done by a professional translator outside the team
- Final review, done by another marketing professional in our team
You might not believe it, but in certain cases we still get minor complaints. This is because Chinese language can be interpreted in many different ways. Therefore translations are always a difficult point in the list.
Is Customization a mandatory requirement?
Let’s not forget about the Chinese cultural customization. Website localization embraces translating and localizing a site into different languages making sure all content (text, images and videos) is translated correctly in an accurate, cultural and technical manner.
As stated before when talking about content, we are also talking about images and videos. There are no written rules and it has similarities to the domain section we discussed above. There are brands like Nike or Zara that prefer to maintain their international feel using western models in their multimedia strategy. Many young Chinese users welcome this method, but not all of them. Depends on the strategy you want to follow.
9 – PAYMENT OPTIONS. CREDIT CARDS? NO, THANKS
In the previous post, we wrote about the BATs (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent). In China, the online payments market is currently dominated by two of these two tech giants – Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat payment with 49.2% and 20% market share respectively.
These companies try to increase their market share by adding more brands and merchants within their ecosystem; something that both companies effectively handle. Also cash is king, as cash on delivery holds a strong position. The fast and vast adoption of electronic payments via mobile is likely to counter this trend in due time.
It is actually China and not the US at the leading edge of the trends towards mobile payments technology. Just for putting an example, both WeChat and Alipay have long used the now famous QR codes to let Chinese netizens pay for purchases and transfer money. It seems they have jumped over some natural technological development processes. This kind of behaviours can be quite normal in undeveloped countries that start to grow very rapidly.
What happened is that they adopted the mobile payment technologies even before implementing some existing ones as a huge percentage of the Chinese population accesses the Internet via mobile devices.
Another tip?
Get ready to integrate Alipay in your website as first and mandatory option. And seeing how fast Tencent WeChat payment is growing, that would be your second natural option.
10 – SEO
Once your website is ready, you will need to submit it to Baidu creating a Baidu Webmaster Tools account (only available in Chinese). That way Baidu will be able to index the site properly and your great Chinese adventure starts!
Search engine optimization done in Baidu is not so very different as the one you could do for Google. Anyway, we would like to note a few differences I think you need to know:
– Meta description – unlike Google and Bing, Baidu still uses Meta descriptions as a ranking factor. Keyword targeted description match users’ queries and their demands, which would help with the click through rate (CTR).
– Indexation – Baidu’s web crawling bot, Baiduspider, is not as advanced as the one from Google. As a result, you will need to help Baiduspider to discover and index your pages in different ways. Without mentioning that you can go to sleep and wake up with huge traffic losses or de-indexed pages usually caused by a penalization. Be careful what you do!
– Link building – On Baidu, it is not about the quality of the publishers’ website, it is more about the unique relevancy of the content (as it relates to your content) and the quantity of links to your pages. Baidu penalizes duplicate content and it also disallows irrelevancy. Authority and quality of the publisher is not that important (for now). In short, the more the merrier as long as it is not duplicate.
– Baidu services – Baidu offers a lot of different products apart of Search; use them and leverage their integrated marketing power. The most useful are Baidu Zhidao (questions and answers service) and Baidu Baike (Wiki service), but there are tons of other services that might be helpful to increase brand awareness and for content creation.
OTHER ASPECTS
As for the tracking, most people use Baidu Tongji and/or Google Analytics. Yes, you read it well; Google Analytics still works in China and it is the only Google service that still does. You will find many detractors, but for what we have seen there is no huge discrepancies between the data collected by both systems (usually not higher than 5%). And Google Analytics has more functionalities than Baidu Tongji.
It is also important to mention the typography. Chinese language is not easy to read due to the difficulty associated to its typography. With 40,000 characters, they are divided in strokes which amount can vary between 1 and 60. Therefore the font size should be at least 12px.
At 2 Open, we would be pleased to help you.Take the advantages the Chinese market offers.
With the cooperation of our Digital Marketing and Ecommerce Agency, China will be at your fingertips.
Do not hesitate to visit us We´d loved to hear from you!
This article has been edited by Paula Vicuña, from 2 Open.
Is Sina Weibo On The Way Out?
There are plenty of Social Media platforms in China: while a few achieve great success, many succumb to a highly competitive scenario.
Result of its dynamism, it is essential to keep attention on the changes that China faces in the digital world.
From 2 Open, we have prepared a brief introduction about Weibo´s current situation.
Our goal is to give you some tips to fully understand what is going on with one of the biggest Chinese Social Media.
Do not hesitate to contact us for a more thorough analysis!
Weibo is a Social Media platform to produce, share and find out Chinese-language content.
As a leading platform, provides an easy way to express in real time and interact with people and corporations.
Its importance is not only due to its capacity to be an official/unofficial news source, but also because it allows people to express themselves in a public way.
The doomsayers come into the picture
Currently, Alibaba is the biggest Chinese e-commerce company: it provides C2C, B2C and B2B sales services via web portals, plus electronic payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.
Three years ago, Alibaba bought 18% stock of Weibo. Since then, several media have speculated that Weibo or even Sina might be acquired by Alibaba in a short time.
Encouraged by the rise of Wechat, many marketers have predicted the fall of Weibo. Well, the latest Earnings report proves they were wrong.
Is Weibo on the way out? Let the Earnings speak the truth
According to official Earnings Report of 2016 Q2 from Sina Weibo, the Net profit of 25.9 million dollars (net revenues of $ 146.9 million) increased 516% compared to the same period last year.
Moreover, Weibo 2016 Q2 data shows the Total revenue of Weibo is 146.9 million, including 127.2 million revenue from Advertising business, value-added services $ 19.7 million for value-added services.
Let’s review the users’ data on Weibo now
Monthly Active Users –MAU- is 282 million, increase 33% compared to the same period of last year. In addition, Daily Active Users –DAU- is 126 million with 36% increase compared to same period of last year.
Is noteworthy that 89% of them are mobile users.
The progress is closely related to their own media advantage
Three years ago, relying on its social communication advantages, Weibo attracted $ 600 million of Alibaba, while became an effective channel for celebrity campaigns, events, marketing and other commercial activities.
After that, Weibo focused on the advertising model. At the end, it decided to put aside Alibaba and manage the business alone.
In 2016 Q1, advertising investment from small and medium enterprises increased 147%. The quantity of SME’s and self-service advertisers reached 830K with 25% increase compared to previous quarter.
In 2016 Q1, investment in small and medium advertising revenue grew 147%, the number of SMEs and self-service advertisers reached 830,000 and a 25% increase the previous quarter.
Why both SMEs and big brands value Weibo a lot?
Both leverage it as an important channel frequently, specially because:
- Increase of traffic and users with 282 million MAU
- Optimized Algorithm of Ad Platform
- Active Internet Celebrities
- Live－streaming
The outbreak of short videos
We should add that speaking of its development path, the outbreak of short videos is also a milestone of growth of Weibo.
According to the 2016 Q2 Earning report, the playback amount of short videos on Weibo has increased 200%.
Meanwhile, the Internet celebrity economy is rapidly booming. Based on short videos, live-streaming broadcast and e-commerce, Weibo occupies the core position of social media with its incredible social power.
Margin improvement for future
The operating leverage will keep being prominent in the future. Based on the non-GAAP, the operating Margin rate of Weibo was 23.6% in the second quarter.
It is expected that the Weibo´s operating Margin rate could reach 25.2% in the third quarter, 23.4% in 2016 financial year, and 28.7% in 2017 financial year.
After seven years, Weibo proves to the world its strength and influence.
Do you still think Weibo is on the way out?
Our Digital Marketing and Ecommerce Agency have the experience of a team dedicated to know in depth the Chinese Social Media.
If you are looking to push your sales in China, do not hesitate to contact us.
Moreover, if you are interested in receiving to your mail the latest trends of Chinese Social Media, please suscribe to our monthly Newsletter!
This article has been edited by Paula Vicuña, from 2 Open.