Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) is one of our favorite stocks at Money Morning, but buying shares of BABA isn’t the only way to make money from the Internet giant.

We’ve uncovered a secret profit play that could climb roughly 70% in the next 12 months.

But it could happen faster than that, which is why we had to make sure you saw this report today…

Secret Play on AlibabaAlibaba Chair Jack Ma is on a buying spree, purchasing food-delivery startup Ele.me in April for an implied valuation of $9.5 billion.

He then bought e-commerce platform Daraz in May for an undisclosed amount.

And the company we’re about to mention is on his radar.

In fact, if he wants to beat rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. (OTCMKTS: TCEHY) in the race to dominate China’s messaging and social media scene, he needs to own this company.

That could lead to a massive windfall of 70% or more in the next 12 months…

This Asian Tech Stock Could Climb 70% in One Year

SINA Corp. (Nasdaq: SINA) operates Weibo Corp. (Nasdaq: WB), a social media platform with 411 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of Q1 2018.

It’s considered the Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) of China.

SINA spun off Weibo in 2014, but it owns 46% of WB and has 72% of the voting power.

Alibaba owns 32% of WB.

Now, it’s true the Weibo stock price has climbed 454% over the last five years, while the SINA stock price has climbed 127.39%.

But what’s important is SINA could have bigger gains than WB in the near future…

And there’s one big reason to like SINA right now more than its spin-off…

Alibaba is competing with two social media platforms owned by rival Tencent: WeChat and Tencent Weibo.

It can get a little confusing, but Tencent’s Weibo is its own platform. In Chinese, “Weibo” means microblog.

As of Q2 2017, WeChat had 963 million monthly active users, and Tencent Weibo had 540 million registered users as of 2012, according to TechInAsia.com.

In order to compete with Tencent and its platforms, Alibaba could buy SINA, which would give it full control of Weibo Corp.

By owning all of Weibo Corp., Alibaba would directly oversee how to grow the user base. BABA could integrate other products and services with Weibo as well as advertise to its 411 million MAUs.

SINA has a market cap of $6.8 billion, so with $35 billion in cash, BABA has plenty of money to make a deal happen.

But even if an acquisition doesn’t happen, analysts still have bullish price targets for the SINA stock price.

In the next 12 months, Benchmark expects the SINA Corp. stock price to climb to $159 per share.

From [a recent] (June 14) price of $94.57, that’s a potential gain of 68.12%.

— Jack Delaney

Source: Money Morning