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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zia Sun(zsun) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (7158)	3/28/2000 7:21:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10354

Will the real China play, please step forward? Founders of Sina.com are close friends of Mr. Goldfinger. Guess what they have to say about ZSUNE? Nothing, they've never heard of it! "China Portal Sina.com Strains Toward U.S. Nasdaq Listing By LESLIE CHANG Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL SHANGHAI, China -- China's most popular Internet portal is headed for a U.S. Nasdaq Stock Market listing, but official intrusion at every step of that process highlights the continuing difficulties facing the industry. Sina.com, which claims 16 million daily page views, said it has filed to list four million shares on the Nasdaq, beating domestic rivals to go public. The road show for investors begins Thursday, sources familiar with the offering said, with the as much as $82 million raised to be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. Behind that simple announcement lie months of negotiations with Chinese authorities and multiple compromises. Sina has given ground to officialdom on almost every front to secure Beijing's approval for the listing, from toning down news reports on its site to a restructuring designed to keep key businesses out of the foreign public's hands and even to taking down a satellite dish used to receive foreign television broadcasts. Company executives declined to comment, citing the quiet period ahead of the offering. Unfiltered News Source Sina's roots lie in the very thing that most irritates Beijing: free unfiltered news of the world. The company was born from a merger in 1998 between Stone Rich Sight Information Technology Co., a Beijing software company, and Sinanet.com, a U.S.-based company that ran Internet sites targeting overseas Chinese. Sina burst onto China's Internet scene two years ago with up-to-the-minute online coverage of the World Cup soccer championships in France. The company built a wide network of freelance contributors and signed deals with a host of Chinese publications to supply content, mindful that strong news coverage has huge appeal in a country where the state runs all traditional media outlets. "People started to realize that you could get your news here first. It was a tremendous breakthrough," says Bo Feng, a Shanghai venture capitalist who helped line up early financing for Stone Rich Sight. Last year, Sina cemented its popularity with aggressive reporting and lively chat-room talk after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombing of China's Yugoslav embassy, which U.S. officials said was accidental. The site reported the incident before the state media did, helping to propel it ahead of more established players to the top of Web site popularity surveys. "At the time of the bombing, there was no consideration of what officials were thinking," says a former Sina employee of the decision to report the bombing first. Change in Reporting But Sina's very success put the company in the sights of the authorities. As executives began pushing for an initial public offering last year, Sina's news offerings changed dramatically. Gone are the once-freewheeling reports on Taiwan, many from overseas Chinese publications; Sina's mainland site was conspicuously silent on the island's presidential elections earlier this month other than running state media reports. Meanwhile, visitors to its U.S. site, which is inaccessible from China, can vote on who should be Taiwan's new premier, or the leader of the cabinet. But the mainland site advertises job openings for "content supervisors" with "familiarity with traditional media operating methods." Behind the scenes, the company also has worked overtime to placate authorities, with top executives attending weekly meetings with officials since late last year to discuss the planned share offering, says a person close to the company. According to Chinese regulations, any company with Chinese assets or the bulk of its operations in China must gain approval from as many as three government agencies before such a listing. Sina's intensive focus on news compounds official reluctance to sign off on the issue, people in the industry say. Officials "don't want foreigners to own Internet content providers, because eventually you could have a hostile takeover," leaving control of the company in unfriendly hands, says Duncan Clark, a partner at industry consultancy BDA (China) Ltd. The compromise reached is a bizarre restructuring that hives off the firm's China portal, widely regarded as its most attractive asset. Instead, the listed vehicle will comprise portals aimed at overseas Chinese communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and North America. The Chinese site has been spun off to a domestic company owned by Sina executives that has revenue-sharing and other contractual arrangements with the soon-to-be-listed vehicle, people familiar with the arrangements say. While the practice of shearing off a company's most promising business prior to listing might give investors pause, it's likely to become commonplace for Chinese Internet companies, with Sina once again leading the way for the industry. "If this is what it takes to get approval, companies will do it," says a person familiar with the Sina offering. "Investors will understand that this is the way things get done in China."