Corporate China | Weibo: Jingdong's Liu comes home, Sina Weibo loses lustre

A major homecoming for the top executive at e-commerce giant Jingdong is topping the news this week in China's microblog airwaves, which have been humming with gossip in the run-up to the Christmas holidays. Internet watchers will know I'm talking about -- Jingdong's talkative founder Liu Qiangdong, whose voice suddenly disappeared from the microblogging realm for much of this year. Now we're learning that his silence was due to his quiet departure from China for the US, where he spent a year in a study programme.

Elsewhere in the microblogging world, a couple of high level executives at UnionPay, operator of China's leading electronic payments network, and game operator 4399 are drawing attention to the fact that Sina's (Nasdaq: SINA) Weibo microblogging service may be past its peak and losing its lustre. I've also noticed this trend, which spotlights how China's Internet seems much more susceptible to fads than in other parts of the world.

The article is a bit vague, saying only that Liu was at Columbia University for some unspecified training. It adds that he recently returned to his company, China's second largest e-commerce player behind Alibaba, and has made several appearances since then at company events. The article also adds that many changes have taken place at Jingdong in Liu's absence, including executive shifts and also an official change in the company's name to Jingdong from its previous informal moniker of 360buy.com.

Liu became famous for freely speaking his mind, resulting in occasional conflicts with his big-name investors, including Russia's Digital Sky Technologies (DST). In the biggest of the apparent contradictions, Liu said at one point last year that Jingdong had no immediate plans for an IPO. But at the nearly same time, media reported the company was moving ahead with just such a plan and even hired investment banks and held investor conferences before finally scrapping the idea.

I suspect that Liu's year in the US was part of a compromise between him and his big investors, giving him a face-saving way of leaving the company for a year while more experienced managers made important strategic changes. Now that Liu is back, it will be interesting to see if he resumes his same outspoken role or lowers his profile and becomes more of a figurehead. I'm sure DST and other investors would prefer the latter, though Liu himself may want to assume his former role. Either way, Liu's return does seem to indicate that Jingdong's year-long overhaul is almost complete and the company could try to relaunch its IPO process early next year.