Sina's Growth Strategies in China

In its efforts to overcome this problem, the company focused on fee-based services and made use of another opportunity that arose in the growing Chinese economy -the popularity of mobile phones. Sina began offering MVAS to its users through Short Messaging Service (SMS). MVAS allowed Sina to reduce its dependence on online advertising and by 2003, it accounted for 56% of its total revenues.

Riding on the success of its SMS-based services, Sina made a profit for the first time in 2003. Commenting on the role played by MVAS, Nathan Midler, an analyst with IDC said, "Text messaging has really provided the necessary lift for these guys (Sina) to get to profitability."²

During that time, university students were guaranteed jobs when they passed out. However, student preferences were not taken into consideration by the government when jobs were assigned to them. Wang was assigned a job in a factory located in Beijing's outskirts. The Beijing University was situated in Zhongguancun, a region known for hundreds of technology start-ups. Wang applied for leave from the factory and joined a start-up firm in Zhongguancun. He got involved in all the aspects of the computer business and slowly developed a liking for programming. Wang decided to focus on software development and joined the Founder Group³ where he developed a Chinese language conversion interface for the Windows operating system...