About China.com

China.com

China.com, known in Chinese as Zhonghua Wang, is the Chinese-language portal published at china.com by the Hong Kong company China.com Inc. — the business whose July 1999 listing on Nasdaq made it one of the first Chinese internet portals to go public in the United States, and for a time the most famous "China concept" stock in the world. The portal itself has outlived the corporate drama: it continues to publish news, finance, military, sports and entertainment channels for Chinese readers worldwide. China.com's profile is therefore two stories at once — a working Chinese news portal, and a landmark of internet history whose name, domain and stock-market debut taught global investors the phrase "China internet" in the first place.

Origins: China Internet Corporation

The company's roots lie in Hong Kong in 1994, when Peter Yip helped the Xinhua News Agency register China Internet Corporation (CIC) in Hong Kong and raised an initial $25 million to start the venture. CIC's decisive move was acquiring domain names of extraordinary obviousness: china.com, hongkong.com and taiwan.com. Renamed Chinadotcom, the company became the vehicle for those addresses. The pedigree of its shareholder register at listing showed how many constituencies wanted a stake in the China internet story: America Online held about 10 per cent with an option to raise it; New World Infrastructure held 22.7 per cent; Xinhua News Agency, the state news agency, held 13.6 per cent; US internet advertising firm 24/7 Media held 9.5 per cent; and Taiwanese CD-ROM maker CMC Magnetics held 4.4 per cent. Lehman Brothers underwrote the offering.

The 1999 Nasdaq debut

China.com's initial public offering was a defining spectacle of the dot-com era. The offering was priced at $20 a share on the Monday, and when trading opened on the Tuesday in July 1999 the stock opened at $45.75 — more than twice the offer price — quickly rose to $66, and closed its first session at $56.63, with contemporary reports putting the amount raised at between $56 million and $89 million depending on the tranche counted. It was the first internet issue ever to concentrate its business on Greater China, and analysts treated it as a test of American appetite for Asian internet assets. The enthusiasm ran well ahead of the business: the company's 1998 revenues were reported at $3.5 million against a net loss of $8.5 million, and one pre-IPO assessment noted that china.com generated roughly 100,000 hits a day while market leader Sina drew more than two million. Chinadotcom followed the Nasdaq listing with a Hong Kong GEM listing in 2000; the two listings together raised about three-quarters of a billion US dollars.

The portal business

Underneath the stock, there was a portal. China.com operated as a Chinese-language gateway offering news and content alongside internet services, with sibling sites for Hong Kong and Taiwan under the hongkong.com and taiwan.com domains. Its content was screened through its relationship with Xinhua, the state news agency — a fact contemporary American coverage noted could limit its appeal against commercial rivals. The market rankings of the day were unkind: a January survey by CNNIC, China's official internet information centre, ranked China.com 17th in popularity among Chinese websites, behind Sohu, Sina, Yahoo and NetEase, and an Australian consultancy's survey left it outside the top 20. An employee conceded to reporters that the company was a late entrant with catching up to do. The four portals that did win the market — Sina, Sohu, NetEase and later Tencent — listed in the US in 2000 and in Hong Kong in 2004, and the portal race that China.com had seemed positioned to lead passed to them.

Decline of the listed company

The corporate sequel is documented in the business press. Chinadotcom burned through an estimated $500 million in the four years after its listings while its online services never gained traction, in the summary later offered by TechNode. The company filed for bankruptcy protection and was delisted from Nasdaq in 2011. In 2013, its successor, Chinadotcom, announced the sale of its internet portal business to Guoguang Global Media Holdings for HK$90.80 million, about US$11.8 million — a small fraction of the sums the listings had raised. James McGregor, a former Dow Jones executive in mainland China, recounted the company's rise in his book One Billion Customers, and the episode is still cited as the archetypal first-wave China internet story: a priceless domain, a state pedigree, a spectacular float — and a portal that the market routed around.

The portal today

The china.com that readers visit now is the continuation of that portal business under later ownership: a general Chinese-language news portal publishing channels for news, finance, military affairs, sports and entertainment, addressed to Chinese readers worldwide. Its content mix reflects the durable formula of the Chinese comprehensive portal — fast general news at the centre, with military and finance coverage that historically drew loyal niche audiences to the site, and entertainment and sports for breadth. The Hong Kong base of its publishing company remains part of its identity: it is a Hong Kong-registered China portal, operating in the Chinese language, rather than a mainland newspaper's website.

Why China.com still matters

China.com's historical footprint is secure regardless of its traffic rank. It was the first Chinese internet company to list in the United States, ahead of Sina, Sohu and NetEase, and its July 1999 debut — opening at more than double its offer price — was treated at the time as a bellwether for the entire Asian internet sector. Its domain remains one of the most recognisable addresses on the Chinese web, a fact analysts noted even while doubting the business behind it: an average reader halfway around the world, as one Deloitte manager put it in 1999, would type "china.com" before anything else for China content. For media historians, the portal is the surviving artefact of that first moment when "China" and ".com" were fused into a single investable idea.

Distinguishing China.com

China.com should not be confused with the mainland state portals with similar names. It is not China.org.cn, the state information office's multilingual site; not chinaso.com, the state media search portal; and not the China Daily or People's Daily websites. It is a Hong Kong company's commercial portal with a state-news lineage through Xinhua's early shareholding and content role — a hybrid origin that itself captures the experimental character of China's 1990s internet.

The battle it lost — and what it proved

The portal war China.com entered in 1999 was decided quickly. Sina, formed in December 1998 from the merger of a Silicon Valley startup founded by Stanford graduate students with a Beijing software firm, claimed 16.6 million hits a day and 3.1 million registered users by early 2000, and Chinese websites raced to follow Chinadotcom to Nasdaq — Sina, Sohu and NetEase all listed in the United States in 2000. Industry insiders at the time believed the Nasdaq board had room for only a handful of Chinese portal companies, which made Chinadotcom's head start look decisive; in the event, the first mover's advantage belonged to the domains, not the audience. Yet the episode proved something durable: that a Chinese-language content business could command American capital on the strength of China's internet growth alone. Every later wave of Chinese technology listings, from the portals to the e-commerce and social platforms that followed, traded on a story whose first public draft was China.com's 1999 prospectus — revenues of a few million dollars, losses larger than revenues, and a valuation built on the size of the audience China would one day have online.

Official website

China.com is published from Hong Kong at its official website, china.com. Its corporate history is documented in the contemporary financial press of 1999–2000 and in later retrospectives by TechNode and others covering the sale of the portal business in 2013.