China’s second-biggest video-sharing site Tudou.com (NASDAQ:TUDO) nailed its US IPO two weeks ago, and since then has been courting attention from Sina (NASDAQ:SINA). Last Monday we reported that Sina had effectively bought up four percent of Tudou, and now today an SEC filing reveals that Sina has actually taken an even bigger bite of Tudou – a full 9.05 percent.
SEC documents reveal that late last week Sina made an additional purchase of Tudou’s post-IPO shares – a full US$35 million more. That takes Sina’s stake in Tudou up to 2,567,570 in American Depositary Shares (ADS), which confer full rights of Sina ownership in that stake, including voting rights in Tudou Holdings Ltd. The two transactions are equivalent to just over 10 million common stocks.
Sina’s spending on Tudou thus far is US$66.4 million. Its nine percent portion of Tudou is an even bigger indicator of strategic intentions. Indeed, the SEC papers show that it is hoping to work together with Tudou in terms of, to quote the files, “business outlook; legislative and government regulation; general economic conditions; and money and securities trading.” But those generic terms don’t give too much of a clue of whether, say, Sina might want to merge its own video portal with Tudou.
Recently, Sina has been busy trying to monetize its successful Weibo platform with virtual credits that are usable in social games such as WeiCity.
[Source: Donews – article in Chinese]
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