Sina, the company that runs China’s leading Twitter equivalent, is launching a new social communication product and making more investment in online gaming to fight larger rival Tencent on its own turf.
The offensive comes as WeChat, Tencent’s fast-growing mobile messaging app, has eroded the popularity of Sina’s Weibo microblog and sent most other Chinese internet companies scrambling to grab their own piece of the country’s mobile internet.
“We are going to launch a new social media product complementary to Weibo that focuses more on groups, interest groups,” Charles Chao, chief executive, told the Financial Times. “It has chat, news feed, pictures.”