Alibaba and Tencent posted record transactions on November 11, also known as Single’s day, thanks to free gifts and rewards promoted on their online messaging platforms. Analysts said Alibaba, through its marketing on microblogging platform Sina Weibo, and Tencent, with campaigns on its popular WeChat social mobile-messaging service, had demonstrated the effectiveness of having a “social commerce” strategy for the shopping day. The total gross merchandise volume achieved by Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace hit a daily record CNY35.01 billion. That topped the CNY19.1 billion total on November 11 last year and CNY5.3 billion in 2011. Rival Tencent’s 51buy campaign on WeChat allowed smartphone users to view, make orders and finish payment directly on the social mobile-messaging platform. On November 11, Tencent’s 51buy website offered the usual extensive sales that have become the norm on Single’s Day, one of China’s biggest online shopping festivals. Single’s Day brought over CNY500 million in profit to Tencent this year, partly thanks to an integrated campaign between the 51buy website and Tencent’s WeChat mobile app. The campaign allowed smartphone owners to view and order products available on 51buy with relative ease through WeChat’s menus, and was aimed at residents in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Despite these city restrictions, of the roughly 600,000 51buy orders made on Singles Day, those via WeChat exceeded 80,000. Members of China’s online community have labeled the process a low-key success, even going so far as to call it Tencent’s “secret weapon”. Others speculated that the ubiquitous nature of WeChat and the ease of shopping it provided was one edge that Tencent had over its chief rival Alibaba, which organized the majority of its Singles Day promotions through its websites. Tmall.com and Taobao.com both have mobile versions, but neither enjoy the popularity of WeChat, which boasts nearly 300 million monthly active users. Xiaomi said it sold more than CNY500 million worth of phones during its Singles’ Day promotion with Alibaba, which would equate to around 200,000 phones if one assumes an average price of around CNY2,500.

Search company Baidu is being sued for providing illegal links to pirated broadcasts of online videos. A group of online video providers including Youku Tudou, Tencent Holdings and Sohu.com, as well as the China Film Copyright Association and the Motion Picture Association of America, are suing Baidu for CNY300 million for losses they claim are caused by the company’s practices. Sohu.com, Tencent, Youku Tudou and LeTV said they had set up technical barriers to block Baidu’s access to their online video content. Youku Tudou has the largest market share in the domestic online video market with a 28.3% share in terms of sales income, but it posted a net loss of CNY105 million in the second quarter this year, as content costs continued to rise. Baidu’s iQiyi and PPStream had a combined 16.9% market share, followed by Sohu’s 10% and Tencent’s 8.5%. “The alliance is clearly targeted at the rising pressure from Baidu’s iQiyi and this could push up the license fees for high-quality TV and film content next year,” said Zhou Juan, General Manager of 56.com, a smaller online video site. Baidu said it had blocked up to 5.8 million links to illegal online video content in the past six months and said it was taking the copyright issue “very seriously.” Internet consultancy iResearch said the online video market grew 37.3% from a year ago in the third quarter to  CNY3.25 billion, Shanghai Daily reports. “Baidu video search pages directly host and play video content, without taking users to a third party site. It is a serious violation of the rights of video sites that have legally procured content,” said Zhou Lin, Deputy Technology Director with Sohu. Baidu is also providing access to rogue video sites that host pirated content and do not have an official license to operate in China, the group claimed. Baidu said it developed a screening system to filter pirated videos and opened a 24-hour channel to receive pirated video reports or complaints. However, Yao Jian, CEO of Youku Tudou, said his company has made reports to Baidu, but nothing changed and pirated content was still rampant online. To be able to provide high quality content to the end user, major legitimate video sites have made huge investments. Charles Zhang of Sohu said the price of TV dramas jumped to CNY1 million per episode, from zero a few years ago.

Sina, operator of China’s most popular microblogging site Weibo, more than doubled its third-quarter net profit from last year after the site’s income grew strongly as more vendors chose social networking sites to better engage with consumers and market their products. Sina’s net earnings jumped 157% to USD25.4 million and sales increased 21% to USD185 million. Weibo contributed USD43.7 million of the sales, more than double from last year and also 46% higher from the previous quarter. Total advertising income gained 26% to USD151.6 million. Earlier this year Sina reached a USD586 million deal for Alibaba to buy an 18% stake in Weibo. The deal is expected to yield USD380 million of revenue in the next three years. Separately, Tencent, China’s largest internet company by market value and operator of the popular WeChat smartphone chatting application, said earnings in the third quarter increased 20% from a year ago to CNY3.87 billion. Its revenue jumped 34% to CNY15.5 billion, the company said. Advertising revenue climbed 26% to USD151.6 million. The company forecast fourth-quarter non-GAAP revenue of between USD190 million and USD194 million, including USD160 million to USD162 million from advertising.

Momo, a popular instant messaging app in China said to be popular among those looking for one-night-stands, now has 80 million users, according to CEO Tang Yan. Some 13 million people use Momo every day, generating a daily average of 500 million messages, according to Tang. The application was launched in August 2011. Demonstrating the power of operating in the Chinese market, Momo boasts twice as many users as Foursquare, a similar application popular outside China. Foursquare was launched two years before Momo and is available in 12 languages. Momo is a location-based instant messaging application for smartphones. Users can connect to people nearby and share free texts, audio notes and photographs over the internet. Momo seeks to “change the future of mobile interactions”, Tang said. The app gained 10 million users in its first year and this year has been particularly successful, adding an extra 50 million users since March. Momo was founded in March 2011 by four Beijingers who had previously worked at two of China’s biggest internet portals, Sina and Netease. Tang did not make public any information about revenue and profit but said, “We are not in debt”.

NQ Mobile, the Chinese mobile-services provider that Muddy Waters accused of inflating revenue, posted third-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates as sales of game and security software rose. Net income more than doubled to USD17.4 million in the three months to September from USD8.13 million a year earlier. NQ Mobile shares closed in New York on November 26 up 6% at USD14.31, but are still down about 40% since October 24, when Muddy Waters, the research firm founded by short seller Carson Block, gave the company a strong sell rating, saying it inflated sales and misrepresented cash balances. NQ Mobile, which has headquarters in Beijing and Dallas, denied the allegations. On November 6, it said it completed the transfer of USD103 million in cash to an account at Standard Chartered to show it had ample reserves. Sales in the third quarter rose 110% to USD54.2 million, NQ Mobile said. NQ Mobile forecast revenue for the fourth quarter of as much as USD63 million, more than the mean USD61.2 million estimate of five analysts. That would bring sales for this year to as much as USD192 million, the company said, the most on record.