Sina: great expectations - FT.com Great expectations are often met by big disappointments. Sina, China's second-biggest news portal, trades at 47 times this year's earnings. The thinking: that Sina Weibo, its Twitter-like microblog, will finally start generating enough sales to save its parent from an otherwise maturing business. Sina's annual sales growth halved by an average 10 per cent over the past three years compared with the prior three as advertising spend shifts away from display advertising to online video and search. Sina has warned investors that advertising sales will be down by a quarter in the first three months of this year, from the end of 2011. This is a traditionally quiet period, but the drop is twice that seen in the last two years. Charles Chao, chief executive, promises that Weibo (meaning microblog) can produce revenues by the second quarter. But those sales are to be led by advertising to computer users, even though he admits that there are more mobile users. Then there is Tencent. Its rival service claims 120m monthly active users compared with Sina's 100m. Although Sina's microbloggers are clearly more active, Tencent has a stronger foothold in China's smaller cities - exactly the market Sina must tap for its growth to keep up. Quarterly growth in the overall number of microbloggers has already halved from a year ago, according to Analysys. Beijing's insistence on using real names - microbloggers must enter identification details to be checked against a government register - will also probably hurt Sina most since its tweets are more politically motivated. Searching the word "democracy" pulls up 11m tweets on Sina's microblog, three times more than on Tencent's. Tencent's sales have grown at more than twice the rate of Sina's over the past five years, yet its earnings multiple is half that of the latter. It is time to accept that expectations for Sina are expensive.