Chinese Internet firms rush for a US listing


China.org.cn, May 9, 2011

The poor performance of China's NetQin Mobile Inc. in its IPO debut made some worry more about a growing market bubble of Internet companies.

More domestic Internet companies are mulling a US listing after Renren.com and NetQin Mobile Inc. landed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) last week.

Renren.com saw its shares surging 28.6 percent in Wednesday's debut, while shares of NetQin tumbled more than 13%, marking the worst first-day performance of any initial public offering (IPO) so far this year in the U.S.

Despite the mixed performances, more Chinese Internet companies are lining up for an IPO on the US stock market. Cloudary Corporation, a wholly-owned online literature business unit of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., and Hexun.com, China's largest business news website, are in the process of a listing in the United States.

Several other companies are also planning to go public on the NYSE this month, including Shanghai-based TaoMee Inc., which runs a social-networking website for Chinese children, and Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology Ltd, a video and music file-sharing company partly owned by Google Inc.

Analysts believe that the listing boom by domestic Internet companies may be partly because of the successful debuts of Youku.com and Dangdang.com by the end of last year.

The year of 2011 marks the fourth round of the dot-com IPO boom, said some industry insiders. The first round happened in 1999 to 2000 when portal websites such as Sina, Sohu and Netease went public. The second round came in 2003 and 2004 as Ctrip.com, Tencent Holdings, Shanda, Jrj.com and 51job.com got listed. The year 2007 saw a third IPO rush, with Alibaba.com and ZTgame.com listing.

While some cheer for the IPO boom, others showed concerns over a potential Internet market bubble in China. The latter believe that investors are overlooking the potential risks for Chinese Internet companies and are doing nothing but help inflate the market bubble.