Watch out, Twitter and Facebook. Your Chinese rival is coming to your shores — and specifically mentioned you as the competition.
Weibo, China's enormously popular microblogging service, filed for its U.S. IPO Friday. The service, being spun off by its parent company Sina Corp, is looking to raise around $500 million from the public offering. The company reported a $188 million revenue figure for Weibo in 2013, which is nearly double Weibo's revenue for 2012. Its losses have shrunk to $30 million a year.
Although Weibo's 241 million monthly active users are nearly all inside China, the company listed a variety of international services as its rivals. Weibo faces "increasing competition from global social media and social networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook," the filing said.
See also: Take That, Twitter: Chinese Site Beats Tweets per Second Record
Meanwhile, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba is also looking to file an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange as soon as April, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal Friday.
If that pans out, it could be one of the largest tech IPOs in recent U.S. history. Alibaba is said to be worth roughly $150 billion, and investors have been eager for years to take a look at its finances.
See also: 5 Chinese Social Networks You Need to Watch
It would also be good news for Yahoo, which owns around a quarter of Alibaba and would finally be able to divest its stock. Yahoo's share would constitute a windfall of around $37 billion — enough for Marissa Mayer to buy Tumblr again 37 times over, in other words.
Meanwhile, Alibaba will also benefit substantially from the Weibo IPO. As of a $586 million investment last year, it owns 18% of the social media service.