Qihoo 360 Technology (QIHU, Financial) is performing strongly. The main reason behind its strong performance is improving traction in search monetization and mobile games. In addition, the company is now positioning itself to improve its financial performance and is taking several initiatives to facilitate this. For example, it is strengthening its PC monetization and carrying out different advertising campaigns. Let's take a look at its different strategies.
Qihoo's smart moves
Qihoo is positive about its integration with MediaV’s platform. It is now using several commercial tools to meet customer preferences. It is expecting these commercial tools to benefit its advertising, further driving good PC traffic monetization. Mobile internet is also turning out to be a profitable venture for the company and it is striding hard to capture this platform also. Qihoo is seeing an impressive improvement in the smartphone users of its 360 Mobile safe. The users have increased from 408 million to 673 million.
This product on the App store is attracting the users at rapid pace which is making Qihoo a market leader in the space. It is also seeing further growth opportunities in China. Its product 360 Mobile Assistant continues to be a go-to platform for the third-party mobile game distribution across China.
Impressive progress
Qihoo continues to make progress in monetizing of its mobile app. It is effectively using advertising and mobile games as a tool for this. Qihoo is pleased with the success of this progress and is seeing good improvement in the revenue as well. Mobile Search market is an emerging market and Qihoo is counting on it as it can be a good contributor to its growth, and it is now putting additional resources in mobile search-related product development, brand building and channel expansion. These efforts are paying off for Qihoo, and it is gaining good traction in the mobile search market.
In the midst of the growing competition and the peers positioning themselves aggressively, Qihoo is confident of its Mobil monetization and search services. It thinks these that these two will be key growth drivers for it in future and will also help it to face the stiff competition from the peers, holding a distinguished edge in the market. As a result of changing landscape across the Chinese Mobile internet, Qihoo continues to follow its open platform strategy in mobile internet.
Moving ahead, Qihoo is also looking for more strategic partnerships. It is also planning to invest meaningfully in these initiatives such as M&A. Qihoo is expecting these strategic measures to further support its effort of building a tier 1 PC and mobile Internet platform in China. In addition, Qihoo is also sharing a market leading position in the Chinese security market with an improvement in monthly active users.
Conclusion
Now moving on to the financials, with a trailing P/E of 47.74 the stocks looks slightly over valued but its forward P/E of 15.49 indicates good earnings growth in the near term. The stock is also looking like a good long term holding as it earnings are growing with a CAGR of 40.90% which is more than the industry average of 20.38%. All these statistics show that there is much steam in the stock for better performance and is definitely a good pick as of now.
