Monitoring press freedom and international affairs from Mid-Missouri Public Radio and the Missouri School of Journalism

--FILE--A passenger walks past an advertisement of weibo.com, the Twitter-like microblogging service of Sina, at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai, China, 13 July 2013.

Weibo fans breathed sighs of relief. Sina (SINA) seems to finally have found a way to monetize the Chinese Twitter, by partnering up with e-commerce giant Alibaba, which amazingly has 90% of Chinas C2C market and 70% of the B2C. Nine analysts upgraded Sina with a medium target price of $95 ($85-$100 range), according to Factset. That is another 10+% upside from where Sina last traded. Sina is already one of the most expensive stocks out there. It trades at 40x 2014 P/E, compared to Baidu (BIDU) and Tencent (HK:0700)s mid-twenties range, or Sohu (SOHU)s high single-digit. Sohu, like Sina, is mainly an Internet portal from the dotcom era. So Weibo must be really valuable. Just how valuable? Nomura Securities, which gives a high-end $100 price target, conducted a sum-of-the-parts analysis. Its analysts Jin Yoon and Yong Wang used Twitters 2011 valuation as benchmark – with a 50% discount – and concluded Weibo is worth $3.7 billion, or 2/3 of Sinas market cap, or 55% of Nomuras target price.(Imaginechina via AP Images)

Monitoring press freedom and international affairs from Mid-Missouri Public Radio and the Missouri School of Journalism.
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