Hey Baby, Let’s Be Relevant Together: MSN China and Renren Partner Up

Today, Renren and MSN China announced plans to cooperate. The strategic cooperation will integrate the two companies social networking platforms. From the release:

According to the strategic agreement, Renren and MSN China will share a wide range of applications and services across the two platforms, including unified account log-in, content synchronization, finding and communicating with friends, among others.

Renren, of course, is China’s largest social networking platform, with over 120 million users. MSN is perhaps best known here for their instant messaging service, MSN Messenger. Given that, this partnership could be grim news for Tencent QQ, which enjoys a lead in the Chinese instant messaging market but has recently seen a downturn in user activity and is already facing some new and powerful-looking competitors in the IM market. Integrating MSN seamlessly into Renren’s giant user base might give users yet another reason not to bother opening a separate program like QQ.

In the last couple of months, we have seen Renren partnering with different corporations to make its social networking service even more exciting for Chinese users. These partnerships include:

• Weddings – a social wedding platform with Recruit of Japan
• Gaming – Integrating Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies for Renren’s social gamers
• Credit – A “social” credit card, in partnership with China Merchants Bank

From a bird’s eye view, it seems that Renren is pretty scattered and has no clear product direction at the moment. But the company is doing well financially, as its latest financial report shows that net losses were down 78.5 percent from last year, before its IPO, whilst net revenues were up 46.6 percent to US$20.6 million, and online advertising revenues were up 100.5 percent to US$8.1 million. Despite this positive growth, the market doesn’t seem to be convinced with the Chinese social network’s performance though; its stock price has plummeted like a falling rock.

With that said, it remains to be seen exactly how this partnership will pan out. The press release certainly makes it sound like it’s all roses, gumdrops, and fairy tales ahead for Renren and MSN China, but then, that’s what press releases do. Reality sometimes has other ideas.

Either way, we’ll keep you posted.