Mediaboss Marketing

FORTUNE -- The market for tech stocks might be volatile now, but forChinese social networking company Weibo (WB), that won't matter a year from now. The company, which madeits public market debut on the NASDAQ today, is selling itself on a long-term growth story that includes a continued push for revenue frommobile and commerce. The companyraised $286 million, valuing itat $3.46 billion; shares priced at at $17 each, the very bottom of the company's range. It kicked off below marketat $16.27 per share, but shares immediately traded up by more than10% to $18.79 at the time of publication.

Fortune spoke with Chairman Charles Chao before the shares started trading this morning.

Weibo has posted widening quarterly losses over prior years. Will the losses continue to grow? When will that trend reverse itself?

If you look at our history, we have been in business for a little bit over four years, but if you look at our numbers, they keep improving as a margin of the growth in revenue over the last few years. Given the opportunity we are facing, and given the market competition, we intend to increase spending in terms of marketing for user growth and engagement, and in product development to become more advanced and more differentiated.

So we intend to invest more this year and next year, and in that way, our operating margin might be under more pressure. But for us, it's to create a much bigger scale, and if we do that, then we can create a much bigger margin. Longer term we will have much higher margins, but shorter term, it might be lower margins.

What is biggest bright spot in business?

There are a lot of bright points -- it's the leading social media platform with a lot of users and engagement, and more importantly, it is becoming a dominant social media platform on mobile, which is the future. As you know everybody is moving to mobile,and the mobile usage is growing rapidly in China. This will make us a social platform with a lot of scale, especially in mobile, and will give us a lot of advantages in developing new business models around mobile moving forward. For example, we're also trying to establish an ecosystem for e-commerce and we're doing this in partnership with Alibaba.

What percentage of your business is mobile vs.desktop?

For usage, it's about 70% coming from mobile on a daily basis. About 80% of our revenue is from advertising, including display and our performance-based advertising system. For display advertising, more is coming from desktop, but the performance-based advertising that's in the information feed -- that is parallel to traffic, 70% from mobile and 30% desktop.

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Weibo Chairman on IPO: 'We're here for the long term'