Sohu interview

My last post relates to Sohu’s advertising market can be found here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/03/statistics-from-dcci-on-chinas-online.html

This is old news. But it still might be valuable.

On 3/12/2008, Sohu’s CEO gave an interview. There are several interesting things that deserved to be written. The interview in Chinese can be found here:

http://it.sohu.com/20080312/n255666563.shtml

Highlight of the interview:

1. Sohu’s Olympics strategy just getting started. We haven’t really seen its fruit yet.

2. He hopes Sogou will really shine in 2009 and becomes the third legs of Sohu (besides advertising and games).

3. Olympics give Sohu a opportunity to grab internet users away from their competitors. Olympics is not an end by a start. That is why when a lot of people say that Sohu’s brand advertising will go down after Olympics, he feels it will be exactly the opposite.

4. Target of Sohu is when China’s internet population reaches 500 millions, Sohu will be China’s top 2 or 3 internet companies (not just China’s portals, but among all internet companies in China).

5. He is confident that by the next quarter (before the Olympics), Sohu will generate more revenue than Sina.

6. Except for online gameing (TLBB is in Vietnam now), there is no interests in expanding to overseas.

I am mostly impressed by what he said on number 5. The wall street analysts are expecting Sina to generate revenue of 81.9M and Sohu to generate a revenue of 76.1M (from Yahoo finance site). He is not going to know how Sina does this quarter or next quarter. But for him to make a claim like that, Sohu must be doing extremely well so far this quarter as well as having good visibility going into next quarter. There might be a little bravado on his part, but I don’t think he would make that claim if he doesn’t think there are excellent chances of that happening.