SINA Corp Earnings: Experts & Crowd Expect Earnings To Fall More Than 86% YoY

Shares of SINA Corp SINA are surging on Wednesday, as the company readies to report its first quarter financial results before the market opens on Thursday.

According to Estimize, experts and the crowd both expect to see a marked decline in earnings in relation not only to the last quarter, but also in relation to the same quarter last year.

For the first quarter of 2014, SINA had reported earnings of $0.15 per share on revenue of $167.30 million. In the latest quarter, earnings came in at $0.24 per share, on revenue of $211.14 million. For the current quarter, the Street anticipates consensus earnings of $0.01 per share on revenue of $186.17 million, while the crowd projects earnings of $0.02 per share on revenue of $186.94 million.

However, as it can be seen in the chart above, the company has managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in six of the last eight quarters. So, earnings could also surprise analysts and the crowd this quarter.

A second chart illustrates the evolution of the Street’s sentiment over time. As it can be appreciated, consensus experienced a steep fall in early-March, recuperating only slightly towards the end of the month and the beginning of April.

Chinese Internet

In a recent report, analysts at Summit Research initiated coverage on the Chinese Internet sector. Overall, they maintain a “favorable view on this sector and a bias towards market leaders with long-term monetization potential.”  The analysts say the Chinese Internet segment “should continue its secular growth over the next several years...we should see depressed margin profiles in 2015 for companies across many verticals due to fierce competition and aggressive investment for emerging growth drivers.”

Related Link: 19 Chinese Internet Stocks That Have Wall Street Talking

That said, they believe “those investments are warranted in order to be better positioned for the next cycle of internet growth, which features emerging drivers such as mobile, local, and eCommerce.”

Regarding the online ad market in China, Summit Research thinks it seems poised to carry on with its secular growth, driven by an ever-increasing penetration of the Internet and advertisers’ growing focus on high-ROI keyword search marketing. Within the companies affected by this phenomenon, there’s SINA, for which the firm issued a Hold rating. To play the Chinese ad market, the experts prefer Baidu and Qihoo.