Internet Outages, and Growth Fears, Kill Chinese Web Companies

January 23, 2014 by Jon C. Ogg

You have heard of Internet outages before from time to time, particularly in the first ten years the public was using the Internet. But what about a large Internet outage affecting massive numbers of websites in China? This week’s outage in China is taking many of the top Chinese Internet stocks lower and lower, and the outages were massive. The question to ask if this is too much of a drop or just the start. Maybe you can blame the weak purchasing managers report in China, but all in all tying web woes to web stocks is far easier to do.

Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) is considered the Google of China and its shares were down almost $12 or 6.8% at $162.58 late on Thursday. Shares were at $175 on early Wednesday, and the 52-week range is $82.98 to $185.50. The 8.5 million shares with 30 minutes left in the day was already 2.5-times normal volume.

E-Commerce China Dangdang Inc. (NYSE: DANG), sometimes considered the Amazon of China, was down 11.5% or -$1.28 at $9.81 late on Thursday. This was trading above $11 on Wednesday and the 52-week range is $3.70 to $12.19. The 5.4 million shares traded at 3:30 was close to 2.5-times normal volume.

SINA Corporation (NASDAQ: SINA) was down 5.5% at $72.81 right before the close. This was above $80 last week and the 52-week range is $45.54 to $92.83. The almost 6 million shares with 30 minutes to go is over twice the normal volume.

500.com Limited (NYSE: WBAI) is the Chinese lotto play. At $39.89, the stock was down 10% and it just recently challenged its highs. The post-IPO range is $18.14 to $44.80. There were more than 1.1 million shares which had traded hands with almost 30 minutes left in the day, almost double the normal average volume.

24/7 Wall St. has tracked some statistics from GreatFire.org showing some very interesting statistics about China.

Chinese censorship stats

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