Chinese social media giant Sina Weibo (微博) is making a push into foreign markets and is considering launching new products in different languages, a senior executive said, brushing off concerns over censorship and credibility.
The Twitter-style platform has long been prominent in China, known for its heavy censorship and Great Firewall, but it now wants to reach Chinese audiences overseas, Weibo Sports (微博體育) senior operations director Zhang Zhe said on the sidelines of Sports Connects, a sport-business conference in Dongguan, China.
“We want everyone in the Chinese-speaking world to use Weibo,” he added.
Sina Weibo is also looking into hiving off new, more niche products in different languages, including English, Zhang said.
TikTok (抖音), a short-form video-sharing app, proved wildly popular this year. Its Beijing-based creator, Bytedance Technology Co (字節跳動), this week announced a global tie-up with the NBA that would allow it to show highlights in several nations, including the US.
Sina “Weibo is a very comprehensively developed product. We not only have videos, we also have images, graphics, articles, even live streams. So we’ve got everything,” Zhang said. “We can’t just introduce [Sina] Weibo outside the country [China], because there’s already Twitter, Facebook. It doesn’t really make sense to compete directly, so if Weibo is going abroad, we think maybe if we have just one dedicated area of the product we can really cut into the market, like TikTok did.”
Zhang’s comments and the Bytedance announcement show how Chinese Internet companies, no longer content with the domestic market in the world’s most populous nation, are beginning to look overseas, but foreign expansion would bring added scrutiny for Sina Weibo, as Chinese social media are known not only for their censorship, but also fake news.
Sina Weibo has a team of more than 1,000 people verifying content on its network and says that it has strong editorial principles to keep its credibility intact.
“That’s not something we’re really worried about at the moment, because Weibo comes from Sina (新浪), which is a big media company with very strong principles like every news company in the world,” Zhang said when asked whether censorship would affect the image of any new products launched abroad. “We also have a huge team working on the content to make sure the news credibility is good, so we don’t think that’s an issue.”
Despite its ambitions overseas, China remains the main focus for Sina Weibo, which launched in 2009 and has more than 400 million monthly active users, making it China’s second-biggest platform behind Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊) WeChat (微信).
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness