About China PRnews

China PRnews

Overview

China PRnews, also written China PR News and known by its website address PRnews.cn, is a Beijing-based press release distribution service founded in 2004. It operates a full-text news announcements distribution service that helps Chinese organisations and companies, public and private, deliver their news releases to targeted financial and general media, to market-makers and to the general public. In its own mid-2000s descriptions it was called the leading provider of press release distribution, targeting and monitoring in China, and the biggest localised expert in electronic press release services in China. Those are the company's own characterisations, but the client record published alongside them was concrete: by 2006 more than 600 listed and private companies were its clients, including Haier, Prima, TCL, Hisense and Changhong, and by 2012 the company said Haier, TCL, Hisense and more than 3,000 prestigious Chinese companies were using its services. Its international distribution rested on partnerships with PrimeZone and its successor wire GlobeNewswire, under which it was described in 2012 as the local partner of the NASDAQ OMX Group in China.

Founding in 2004

China PRnews was founded in 2004 — its early releases specify inception in May 2004 — by veterans of the media and technology industries. That founding background, part media and part technology, matched the business it entered: electronic press release distribution, in which a company's announcement is delivered simultaneously through online and traditional channels rather than printed and posted. The company said it grew quickly from its inception, and the sequence of its own published milestones bears that out. Within about a year of founding it had launched a second, financial information product, the China Stock Rating Platform, in June 2005. By July 2006 it was sufficiently established to deliver a keynote address at the China International Public Relations Congress 2006, and by that date it was already describing a client base of more than 600 public companies listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges together with private companies. Its website, given in every release of the period, was www.prnews.cn, and releases distributed in 2012 still carried individual story addresses in the form prnews.cn/press_release followed by a story number — the visible archive of a working distribution wire.

The distribution service

The core service is defined precisely in the company's standard description: China PRnews operates a full-text news announcements distribution service to assist Chinese organisations and companies, public and private, in delivering news releases to targeted financial and general media, as well as market-makers and the general public. Later versions of the same description add multimedia, describing a full-text and multi-media news announcements distribution service, and state the company's aim of providing a state-of-the-art platform of information distribution and online public relations and investor relations services. The scope of services is listed as targeted news distribution, media monitoring and other value-added services. In other words, China PRnews was not simply a posting site: it sold targeting — getting an announcement to the financial media, general media and market participants for whom it was relevant — and monitoring, so that a client could follow where its news had appeared. Its multi-channel delivery network was described as providing real-time, simultaneous access to key audiences around the globe, including daily newspapers, wire services, the internet, online services and databases, trade publications, institutional and individual investors, and consumers.

Clients: from 600 to more than 3,000

The published client numbers give China PRnews a measurable growth line. In 2006 the company said it had developed more than 600 public companies listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock markets and private companies as its clients, serving their needs of distributing press releases inside China, and one contemporary account of the service put it that Haier, TCL, Hisense and the other 600-plus Chinese companies using it represented nearly half of all the listed companies in the country. The named clients in the 2006 account were Haier, Prima, TCL, Hisense and Changhong, together with other multinational companies — a list dominated by China's consumer electronics and home appliance manufacturers, the sector that produced many of the country's earliest internationally ambitious listed companies. By 2012 the standard company description had been updated: Haier, TCL, Hisense and other 3,000-plus prestigious Chinese companies were using the services of China PRnews. The named anchor clients did not change between the two accounts; the total around them grew roughly fivefold, which the company attributed to its developing distribution coverage, fast customer acquisition and public relations and investor relations expertise.

Media network inside China

Distribution is only as good as the network behind it, and the company's 2012 description sets out the domestic network it claimed to work through. Working closely with its media partners — which it counted as hundreds of Chinese online media, thousands of Chinese traditional media, and world-famous international media — China PRnews described itself as having become one of the strongest and most recognised news distribution and media monitoring platforms in China, and said its distribution covered most prominent Chinese online media. The distinction it drew between online and traditional media matters for a service founded in 2004: in its early years, reaching a Chinese company's audiences still meant reaching print and broadcast outlets in large numbers, while the online media that would later dominate were counted in the hundreds. A distribution firm that could place a full-text announcement across both sets of outlets at once, and then monitor the result, was selling exactly the bridge between those two media worlds that listed Chinese companies of the period needed.

The China Stock Rating Platform

China PRnews was not only a distribution business. In June 2005, roughly a year after its founding, it launched the China PRnews Stock Rating Platform, described as a financial information service. The platform collected analyst recommendations on the China stock market and distributed those analyst recommendations to media and investors. The company's 2006 releases summarised it as a China Stock Rating Platform providing the latest analyst recommendations on the China stock market. This second product is worth recording because it shows the firm's position between two audiences from an early stage: on one side, companies that needed to send their news out; on the other, media and investors who needed distilled professional opinion coming in. A ratings platform that aggregates what analysts recommend, and pushes that aggregation back out through media channels, is an information agency function rather than a public relations function, and it ran alongside the distribution wire for as long as the company's standard descriptions were published.

International partnership: PrimeZone and GlobeNewswire

A Chinese distribution wire could carry a client's news inside China on its own network; carrying it to the rest of the world required a partner. In its 2006 accounts, China PRnews stated that in the international market it partnered with PrimeZone, described as one of the world's leading full-text news release, photo and multimedia distribution services, to disseminate company news from China. The relationship continued as the international partner changed names and owners. By 2012 China PRnews was presenting itself, in the releases it issued through that partner, as the local partner of the NASDAQ OMX Group in China, and its standard description stated that its global distribution was based upon a long-term partnership with GlobeNewswire under NASDAQ OMX. Trade coverage in WatersTechnology reported the relationship from the other side: Nasdaq OMX's GlobeNewswire press release distribution service for listed companies had broadened its long-term partnership with China PRnews to allow the Chinese vendor to distribute GlobeNewswire's platform to local companies, enabling them to distribute their news more widely abroad. The two-way nature of that arrangement — Chinese company news flowing out through the international wire, and the international wire's platform being resold to companies inside China — is the clearest evidence of China PRnews's role as a localisation specialist rather than a purely domestic service.

Public role and industry presence

The firm's public standing in its early years is documented by its appearance at the China International Public Relations Congress 2006, where it recently gave a keynote address, as the July 2006 release recording the event put it. A keynote at the industry's national congress, delivered two years after founding, indicates that the company was being treated as a spokesman for electronic press release distribution in China, not merely as a vendor of it. The same release is the source of the period's fullest statement of the business: leading provider of press release distribution, targeting and monitoring in China; biggest localised expert in electronic press release services in China; more than 600 listed and private clients; the named appliance and electronics clients; the PrimeZone partnership for international dissemination; and the stock rating platform. Later, in 2012, the company was still actively visible on its partner's wire, issuing weekly roundups of top news headlines from China PRnews — collections of the Chinese company stories it had distributed, each linked back to the full-text Chinese story on prnews.cn.

The 2012 roundups as a record of the wire

Those 2012 roundups are useful evidence in themselves, because they show the wire in operation rather than in description. In the week of 2 to 6 July 2012, and again in the week of 23 to 27 July 2012 and the week of 5 to 9 November 2012, GlobeNewswire carried China PRnews roundups in which the full-text story in Chinese was available at a numbered prnews.cn press release address. The November 2012 roundup included, among its top stories, a Haier logistics announcement — the same client name that had headed the company's list six years earlier. The standard description attached to those roundups is also the fullest late statement of the company: a full-text and multi-media distribution service, a state-of-the-art platform ambition, growth since 2004, media partners counted in hundreds online and thousands traditionally, more than 3,000 client companies, services spanning targeted distribution, media monitoring and value-added services, and global distribution resting on the long-term GlobeNewswire partnership. Nothing in the later record contradicts the earlier one; the client total is the main figure that moves.

Position and significance

China PRnews belongs to the first generation of commercial press release wires in China. Founded in Beijing in May 2004 by media and technology veterans, it built a full-text distribution service at the moment when Chinese listed companies — first hundreds, then, on its own account, more than 3,000 of them, including Haier, TCL, Hisense, Prima and Changhong — needed their announcements carried simultaneously to financial and general media, market-makers and the public, across hundreds of online outlets and thousands of traditional ones. It added a stock rating platform in June 2005 that collected and redistributed analyst recommendations, spoke for its trade at the China International Public Relations Congress in 2006, and connected Chinese corporate news to the rest of the world through PrimeZone and then GlobeNewswire, whose platform it was also authorised to distribute to local companies. Its official website is prnews.cn.