Chinese Portal Sina Announces Q2 ResultsChinese Portal Sina Announces Q2 Results

Chinese Internet firm Sina, which also has holdings in both casual and online games in China, has announced its Q2 results, showing a quarterly profit of $10 million, down sharply from $18 million the previous year. The company's profit decrease was largely due to Chinese government restrictions on mobile text messaging services such as adult content and bulk messaging, which meant a 23% decrease to $25.8 million in revenue for the company's formerly core business area. However, Sina showed a sharp increase in Internet advertising to partially offset this, and specifically mentioned its casual Chinese game portal, iGame as a possible area of growth. The portal had roughly 590,000 active users, up from 580,000 active users in March 2005, and operated 28 games at the end of June 2005. The company's partnership with Korean-headquartered firm NCSoft to distribute MMO Lineage 2 in China has been somewhat less successful, however. The game has been deployed in 11 regional telecom data centers throughout China, and the daily average concurrent user count in June 2005 was roughly 72,000 users, down from 93,000 users in March 2005, in a period when Blizzard's World Of WarCraft racked up 1,500,000 total users (and an unknown amount of concurrent users) in just a week. Sina recognized a loss of $46,000 this quarter for its share of net losses from the joint venture with NCSoft.