SouFun celebrates 100 city milestone - China's number one real estate portal, SouFun.com has expanded its operations to represent 100 cities in China, cementing its leading market position. CEO of Telstra, SouFun's majority shareholder, Mr Sol Trujillo said: "SouFun's success in reaching its expansion plan of representing 100 cities by end 2008 is a fantastic achievement and a reflection of the team's commitment to grow and develop the business. "Since acquiring a majority share in the SouFun business in August 2006, Telstra, through our advertising subsidiary Sensis, has been transferring our world-class media-comms capabilities into China. This has included instituting sales management and advertising effectiveness programs to improve sales performance in the world's most thriving online real estate market," Mr Trujillo said.
Reflecting China's strong economic performance, the Chinese online market is a powerhouse of growth. SouFun's online audience of more than 60m unique visitors undertake an average 1.4bn pages views each month. This audience is forecast to keep growing driven by an urban explosion that will see 350m more people living in Chinese cities by 2025. SouFun Founder and CEO, Mr Vincent Mo, said SouFun's successful geographic expansion was complimented by growth in adjacent markets such as home finance and insurance.
"SouFun is now representing 4 times the number of cities compared to our closest competitor, with each city having a population of 1 million people. To further strengthen our value proposition to users and advertisers, we are also offering additional products and services in the home finance and insurance sectors. "China has already over-taken the US earlier this year with the largest number of online users. As a result China has the world's largest internet user base (253m), but is only 19% penetrated (the US has 210m users and 73% penetration, thus providing continued opportunities for SouFun.com," Mr Mo said.
Telstra's investments are strongly positioned as number one in real estate through SouFun, number one in auto through Autohome.com and Che168.com and number two in the digital device market through IT168.com and PCPop.com in China. These three sectors account for more than 40 per cent of the Chinese online advertising market. In addition, the Chinese online advertising market is forecast to grow by 33% CAGR to 2012.
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