China’s Twitter Copycat is Now Worth More Than Twitter

With its plunging shares, Twitter has become cheaper than its Chinese equivalent Weibo.

Launched in 2009, Weibo is now valued at $11.35 billion, according to Tech in Asia. It’s now worth $10 million more than the American microblogging platform, which is now valued at $11.34 billion.

According to the outlet, Twitter lost 5 million monthly active users in the past year, while Weibo attracted 70 million new active users.

Today, Weibo stands strong with 282 million active users, while Twitter has 313 million — a difference of just 31 million accounts.

What happens to Twitter, then? Fortune said the service is bound to become a “zombie” — a previously-favored company that “joins the ranks of walking dead.”

As told by the outlet, these zombies include BlackBerry, Sybase and Zynga.

Twitter reportedly enters into zombiehood by way of making small earnings in the midst of huge losses. It exists, but it’s not growing.

[Resized] Photo by Matt Brown/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

While investors are scratching their heads over Twitter’s situation, CNBC noted that employees are facing a bigger problem — the company is highly-reliant on stocks as a form of employee compensation.

In 2015, the company ‘s stock-based compensation expense of $682.1 million was 18% of revenue. CNBC said it’s more than any other American technology company valued at least $1 billion, citing data from FactSet.

But there’s hope. Forbes predicted that Twitter could be turning Japanese, with SoftBank expressing interest and having resources to save the day. In addition, we know that Japan loves the site more than Facebook, so we’ll be sure to keep an eye open.

In the meantime, cheers to Weibo.