Businessmodel of SINA

Customer Segments

Sina has a niche market business model, with a specialized customer segment. The company targets its offerings at Chinese-speaking consumers who seek to use online and mobile services.

Value Proposition

Sina offers three primary value propositions: customization, performance, and brand/status.

The company offers customization through its Sina.com portal. It features personalized pages by location, with tailored pages for 13 access points within Greater China as well as for its subsidiaries Sina U.S., Sina Korea, Sina Japan, Sina Australia, Sina Germany, and Sina Europe.

The company demonstrates strong performance through its capabilities. Its infrastructure provides users with high-speed access by forwarding queries to its web hosting sites with lower loads or greater resources. Furthermore, its webpages are generated by servers hosted at various partner sites (e.g., China Telecom and China Unicom) that offer multiple connections to the internet, continuous customer service, and a continuous power supply to their systems.

The company has established a powerful brand as a result of its success. Its Sina.com website is the most popular Chinese-language  web portal, with over 280 million registered users. Its Weibo social network controls 56.5% of the microblogging market in China, with 500 million active users and adoption by over 5,000 companies. Its Sina App Engine (SAE) is China’s largest PaaS platform for cloud computing, used by more than 300,000 developers. Its advertising and sponsorship clients include many Fortune 1000 firms. Lastly, it has won many honors, such as recognition as “China’s Media of the Year” by Southern Weekend (2003).

Channels

Sina’s main channels are its sales operation team and local distributors across China. The company promotes its offerings through its website, social media pages, advertising, and attendance of events.

Customer Relationships

Sina’s customer relationship is primarily of a self-service, automated nature. Customers utilize its website and mobile apps while having limited interaction with employees. That said, there is a self-service component in the form of phone and e-mail support.

Key Activities

Sina’s business model entails updating and maintaining a robust platform for its customers. The platform includes its website and mobile apps.

Key Partners

Sina maintains a wide range of content, application, service, and distribution partnerships. The purpose of these alliances is to provide stronger service for customers and extend its offerings to a larger audience. Its content partners display their material on its website. Specific partners include:

·         International Olympic Committee