Charles Zhang Clarified Position on Drop of SOHU.com's Stock Price

SOHU.com's stock price has dropped to less than US$1 for several days on end since March 7 and the firm is confronted with the crisis of being de-listed from the NASDAQ. Charles Zhang, President and CEO of SOHU.com Inc., taking a clear-cut stand on this matter at the "Round-table Forum on Return of Chinese Students from Abroad and Chinese Private Enterprises", said that no matter how terrible a situation Sohu.com is facing in NASDAQ, he won't give up.

According to Zhang, SOHU.com is actually not in so ridiculous a mess as that. Latest statistics of SOHU.com indicate that it has still more than 15 million users with 100 million pages downloaded from the web every day. Besides, it still has the cash flow of over US$60 million, and every quarter sees a rise in profit.

So Zhang deems it ridiculous that the current market value of SOHU.com could be as low as only a bit over US$30 million. This is attributed to the incomprehension by the US capital market of the Internet market in China. "The US's capital market judges China's Internet firms with the American standard and it resulted in investors' wavering or withdrawing from China's Internet firms. The judgement is full of prunes." Zhang asserted.

The low tide of the Internet industry in China now is also a false phenomenon for it was an unusual boom one year ago, according to Zhang. In fact, more traditional industries are in quest for combination with the Internet industry and the Chinese government has offered a better environment for it.

Citing an example he said that as compared with that one year ago enterprises paid at the most a few hundred thousand yuan to advertise on SOHU.com, they'd like to pay RMB 4 million-yuan for it this year.



By PD Online Staff Member Huang Ying


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