SINGAPORE/HONG KONG, May 12 (Reuters) – China’s Alibaba.com Ltd reported a forecast-beating 37 percent rise in quarterly net profit even though subscribers for one of its key products fell sharply.

China’s largest e-commerce company raised the price of its popular ‘China Gold Supplier’ package in January, leading to a drop in membership sign-ups in the first quarter.

However, the company is moving away from a subscription-based business model to focus on boosting average-revenue-per-user by marketing value-added-services, such as “Ali-ADvance” that allows customers to pay for the performance of their keyword search.

Sales at Alibaba.com, a unit of Alibaba Group, 40 percent owned by Yahoo! Inc , are closely tied to China’s exports as its website connects millions of international buyers with Chinese suppliers. The company makes most of its revenue from selling and renewing membership packages.

Net profit in January-March jumped to 452.5 million yuan from 330 million yuan a year earlier. That beat an average forecast of 389.24 million yuan from five analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue grew 25.5 percent to 1.53 billion yuan.

Alibaba said paying members rose 2.9 percent from the previous quarter to 832,468.

SINGAPORE/BANGALORE, May 12 (Reuters) – China’s Sina Corp plans to ramp up investment in its hot Twitter-like product, Weibo, for the rest of the year in order to fend off competition from Tencent Holdings and attract a wider user base.

Sina, which has seen its stock soar on investor hopes that Weibo will be monetized sooner rather than later, reported a 39 percent profit in quarterly net profit after it invested heavily in the platform.

While investors want the site to be monetised quickly, Sina wants focus on expanding its current user base of white-collar users to include students and users in lower-tier cities. Sina hopes to have more than 200 million Weibo users by the end of the year, up from 140 million currently.

“I hope we can build up scale quickly and move to monetization quickly,” said Sina’s chief executive, Charles Chao, on an earnings conference call.

“I think the trend is to go deeper into the market in terms of geographical location so we can get more users,” Chao said.

China’s largest Internet firm, Tencent, has 160 million registered users for its Weibo product and is Sina’s main competitor. Sina hopes to build scale to make it harder for its rivals to compete.

Sina said on Wednesday it earned a first-quarter net profit of $15 million, or 23 cents a share, compared with $24.4 million, or 37 cents a share, for the same period a year ago. Excluding one-off items, it earned 25 cents a share, missing the average forecast of earnings of 26 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

SINGAPORE/HONG KONG, May 11 (Reuters) – Tencent Holdings Ltd , China’s most valuable Internet company, reported a record quarterly profit on Wednesday, driven by strong performance at its online games business and contribution from a U.S. acquisition.

Tencent, which operates hit online games such as Dungeon & Fighter and Crossfire in China’s red-hot market, faces stiff competition from Shanda Games Ltd , Netease.com Inc and Changyou.com Ltd , and Renren Inc in social gaming.

The company, which also runs the country’s largest instant messaging platform and a social-networking portal, posted a 61 percent increase in first-quarter net profit to 2.87 billion yuan.

That beat an average forecast of 2.34 billion yuan from nine analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue rose 50 percent to 6.34 billion yuan, beating an estimate from analysts of 5.91 billion yuan.

Tencent said it booked a revaluation gain arising from its purchase of an additional stake in U.S. game developer Riot Games. [ID:nN0446166]

The company also saw a 76.6 percent rise in online games revenue for the quarter driven by growth in its advanced casual games segment and Crossfire.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The United States collaborated with Saudi Arabia to increase crude oil supplies to China at the expense of Iran, U.S. diplomatic cables show. The move was designed to hurt Iran and win Beijing’s support for sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear program.

China has long worried that oil supplies from Iran could be choked off if Beijing sides too closely with the West over Tehran’s disputed nuclear activity, which opponents say is intended to give it the means to assemble nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful.

But as Saudi deliveries of crude increased to China over the past years, so has Beijing’s support for U.N. sanctions against Tehran — although Chinese state oil conglomerates have been moving into the vacuum created by the withdrawal of most major players from the Iranian oil patch.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to Reuters by a third party, lay out how U.S. diplomats worked with Saudi Arabia and other big Middle Eastern oil suppliers to persuade Beijing to back tougher sanctions on Iran.

Saudi Arabia and the United States discussed how increasing Saudi crude supplies to China “would have the welcome side impact of reducing Iranian leverage over China,” U.S. officials told the Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi in August 2009.

Two months earlier, a senior French diplomat overseeing Middle Eastern affairs told a U.S. embassy official that Saudi diplomats had told China: “If you want oil from us … then you must put more pressure on Iran.”

For Saudi Arabia, increasing crude exports to China also made economic sense.

SHANGHAI/NEW YORK, April 29 (Reuters) – When Chinese social networking site Renren goes public next week, investors will likely ignore big risks the company faces, and be lured instead by a combination of the words “China” and “social networking.”

Hot Chinese tech companies like Internet search engine Baidu Inc (BIDU.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and online video site Youku.com (YOKU.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) have risen triple-digit percentages since their IPOs, whetting investors’ appetites for such offerings.

And this is in a sector that is hot in the U.S. Facebook, the biggest social network company in the world, has a market value of somewhere around $70 billion, based on a share sale currently being contemplated, making it worth more than companies such as Boeing Co.[ID:nN27185713]

The demand for Renren shares was clear on Friday when the company raised the expected price range of its IPO by 30 percent to $12 to $14 per share.

“Appetite to invest in China right now is so strong that some investors are willing to ignore factors that they wouldn’t in other markets,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based company that advises investors on China’s Internet and telecommunications sectors.

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Renren revised filing shows slower growth [ID:nN28228501]

BEIJING, April 29 (Reuters) – China’s red-hot Internet sector is due for a correction, with valuations reaching frothy levels, and some players will be eliminated, industry executives and venture capitalists say.

But the decline will not be as steep as the dive seen in the U.S. dot.com bubble which burst in 2000, triggering a slump in stock prices and put ting a brake on the broader economy.

“There is definitely a bubble and a correction will come. When it will come depends on many factors and it won’t correct as badly as 2000,” said Gavin Ni, chief executive of Zero2IPO Group, a venture fund targeting Chinese Internet firms.

“The situation now is that you actually have the users and the business models to support that growth so it’s not all speculative spending.”

Internet darlings such as Baidu Inc and Youku have seen their stocks climb more than 50 percent this year as U.S. investors bet on the Chinese Internet growth story.

Baidu now is trading at 57 times its 2011 earnings while Sina Corp , which runs the country’s top Internet portal and a popular Twitter-like service, is trading even higher at 77 times.

Google shares, by contrast, are trading at an affordable 16 times its 2011 earnings.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s ministry of culture is to punish search engine company Baidu (BIDU.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) for providing illegal music downloads, a move that may hit its soaring share price.

Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported on Monday the government will punish 14 websites that have provided illegal music downloads, including Baidu, China’s top search engine.

Xinhua reported that an official said the websites continued to provide illegal downloads after repeated warnings not to do so. Details about the punishment were not released.

Baidu spokesman Kaiser Kuo said it would act quickly to remove links to files identified by the ministry.

“We are aware that songs require approval and have sought to comply with previous notifications from the ministry of culture. But search engine indexing is a continuous process and some files may have reappeared in results,” Kuo said.

While Xinhua did not say why the songs were illegal, Baidu said it stemmed from a warning issued over a year ago to providers of online music, identifying songs deemed unacceptable.

The links to those songs had been removed but new links began to show up because the songs had been uploaded by other users on searchable sites that were found by Baidu, it said.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s Ministry of Culture will punish Baidu Inc for providing illegal music downloads, a move that poses near-term risk to the firm’s soaring stock price.

Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported on Monday that the government will punish 14 websites that have provided illegal music downloads, including Baidu, China’s top search engine.

Xinhua reported that an official said the websites continued to provide that illegal downloads despite repeated warnings not to. Details regarding the punishment were not released.

“We are aware that songs require approval and have sought to comply with previous notifications from the Ministry of Culture. But search engine indexing is a continuous process and some files may have reappeared in results,” said Kaiser Kuo, a Baidu spokesman, in an emailed statement to Reuters.

“Baidu will now take quick action to remove links to any files that have been identified by the ministry,” Kuo said.

Analysts said the move by China’s Ministry of Culture may rattle Baidu’s share price in the near term as uncertainty over the extent of the punishment lingers.

“There have always been legal issues with Baidu music,” said Dick Wei, a Hong Kong-based analyst with JPMorgan, adding that the impact on Baidu would be clearer once the exact punishment was known.

SHANGHAI, April 22 (Reuters) – Striking truck drivers gathered for a third day on Friday in Shanghai’s main harbour district amid heavy police presence and signs the action has already started to curb exports from the country’s busiest container port.

A crowd of up to 600 people milled about outside an office of a logistics company near the Baoshan Port, one of Shanghai’s ports. Some threw rocks at trucks whose drivers had not joined in the strikes, breaking the windows of at least one truck.

The strikers, many of them independent contractors who carry goods to and from the port, had stopped work on Wednesday demanding the government do something about high fuel costs and what some called high fees charged by logistics firms, said the drivers, who clashed with police officers on Thursday.

As many as 50 police officers were dispatched to the area on Friday, and at least two people were arrested after throwing rocks at trucks.

The strikes and protests, if they continue, could become a worry for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which fears public discontent that could erode its authority and alarm investors.

The crowd thinned out after a policeman said authorities plan to meet with the representatives of the truck drivers on Monday for talks aimed at ending the strike.

“Please disperse and go back,” he said with a loudspeaker, telling truckers who had gathered near a road junction. “We are already talking to your representatives. There will be an answer for you on Monday.”

SHANGHAI, April 21 (Reuters) – Chinese online video website Tudou Holdings is still planning to go public in the United States and is on schedule for its listing, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Thursday, after rumours circulated in the market that the company could be up for sale to a rival.

Tudou filed for an initial public offering in November last year, seeking to raise up to $120 million to purchase content. However, its IPO plans were stalled and its rival Youku.com Inc managed to beat it to the market, soaring in its market debut. Youku’s stock is now trading at five times its IPO price.

Rumours have surfaced on industry websites in the past day that Tudou was looking to be acquired by another firm such as Youku, raising the question of whether Tudou was still proceeding with its IPO.

A Tudou spokeswoman told Reuters on Thursday that Tudou’s IPO was still on the cards and was going according to schedule, but declined to comment on whether Tudou was seeking to be acquired.

Youku also declined to comment.

China’s online video industry is highly competitive and saturated with many players jostling for content licensing rights. Other than Youku, Tudou competes with Ku6 , PPTV, PPStream and Baidu-backed Qiyi.com.

Analysts said Tudou’s coming onto the market more slowly could have given Youku an unassailable advantage.