Thoughts on Focus Media's Acquisition of Dotad (FMCN)

Philip Lin who writes the China, Tech and Business blog posted his opinion on Focus Media's (ticker: FMCN) acquisition of Dotad earlier today. Key extracts:

Extending core asset - Focus has a strong stable of media buyers and advertisers, and this acquisition offers these buyers an alternate platform. Although the Framedia acquisition implicitly offered a low tech alternative, it was still in-building. Dotad allows Focus to leverage its customer relationship by giving advertisers an entirely different channel (mobile) and audience reach (youth segment).

Finding growth - Growth in the nascent mobile ad segment is likely to outpace growth in the in-building A/V advertising, where Focus already has 90%+ coverage of major targeted Tier 1 buildings.

What's next for Focus? Its hard to say but I'd expect Focus to maintain its aggressiveness. With few well capitalized players in the outdoor media industry, its probably a good time for Focus to go decidedly low-tech and enter billboards - in the same way Google has experimented with print advertising in the US.

Full post here.

Comment: Lin owns shares of FMCN.