Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Growing pains for Shanda

It is a great feeling to be correct on something. Just the other day, I speculated that Shanda might have some troubles ahead while trying to integrate all those soon-to-come acquisitions in the areas outside online gaming.

According to the Pacific Epoch, top officers from Shanda subsidiaries – QiDian, Digital Red and Holdfast – told to the press that there are some serious hurdles on the way to fully integrate these subsidiaries to the mother company. However, they all agreed that Sina acquisition would benefit them. I for one, am keeping my fingers crossed for successful integration, it would be a shame to waste shareholders money.

Shanda has been busy on another front too. According to the same source, Shanda is planning for a big announcement later this week. It is said to have something to do with IPTV project that they are in together with Huawei and UTStarcom.

I must once again stress that it is very difficult to be a modern day Leonardo. Company can excel on many fronts, given big enough resources, but with limited financial backing, in order to reach success, company has to insert the genius of the Leonardo into their work. Obviously I am not qualified to judge whether Shanda has that extra something, all I can say is that CEO Chen has lot of confidence on himself.

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