Opinion | Sina, Alibaba resurrect tie-up talks

Sina's new tie-up with Alibaba could value Sina Weibo at around US$1.5 billion, and could pave the way for an accelerated IPO for Weibo if the pairing is successful

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Alibaba would be looking to offer its popular e-commerce services to Sina Weibo's 500 million registered users. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:55am, 29 Apr 2013

It looks like I may have been premature in declaring last month that talks for a tie-up between leading web portal Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) and e-commerce leader Alibaba were dead. According to the latest reports, the pair have resuscitated their negotiations that began late last year and later collapsed due to disagreement over a valuation for Sina's popular Weibo microblogging platform. Now media are reporting the talks have quietly resumed in recent weeks, and a deal could be announced very soon.

I've previously said that such a tie-up looks very smart for both sides, since presumably Alibaba would be looking to offer its popular e-commerce services to Sina Weibo's 500 million registered users. From a more near-term perspective, the most interesting element of this deal will be the valuation that Sina ultimately gets for Weibo, since part of the deal would reportedly see Alibaba buy a stake in the microblogging unit. Such a development would come as a huge boost for Weibo, as Sina works hard to monetise the popular but revenue-challenged service in preparation for a spin-off and potential separate public listing in the next two years.

All that said, let's take a closer look at the latest headlines, which cite several unnamed sources confirming that the two sides have resumed their talks after negotiations collapsed late last year reportedly over Weibo's valuation. The reports say talks are now in the late stages, with Alibaba most likely to pay about US$500 million for a 15 to 20 per cent stake of Weibo. They say announcement of a final deal could come very soon, implying we could hear something in May.

The figures from the report would value Weibo at anywhere from US$2 billion to as much as US$4 billion, compared with Sina's own current market capitalisation of about $3.4 billion. So at the low end of that range, Weibo would still account for nearly 60 per cent of Sina's market value even though it only now contributes about 10 per cent of the company's revenue. I suspect that some of these leaked figures are probably a bit optimistic and are coming from Sina, and we could see Weibo ultimately valued at US$1.5 billion to perhaps as much as $2 billion in any upcoming deal.

It's obvious from these high figures that both Sina and especially Alibaba see huge potential in this tie-up. Such a pairing would instantly give Alibaba a big presence in the fast-growing social networking services (SNS) space in China that is dominated by the likes of Sina Weibo, Tencent (0700.HK) WeChat and QQ and the more Facebook-like Kaixin and Renren (NYSE: RENN).

These social networking services are huge headline-grabbers, as they can quickly sign up tens and even hundreds of millions of users, as evidenced by Weibo's explosive growth over the last four years and WeChat's over the last two. But while it's easy to sign up lots of subscribers, operators are finding it much more difficult to monetise those services that are usually offered for free - a problem also being faced by the original Facebook (Nasdaq: FB).