Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, is planning a stock market listing in New York "relatively soon," a source told Xinhua News Agency on February 25.

The initial public offering (IPO), which will look to raise about $500 million, is scheduled for the first half of the year, possibly in May.

For the fourth quarter of 2013, Weibo's total revenues reached $71.4 million, up 151 percent year on year and 33.7 percent quarter on quarter, resulting in a profit of $3 million, according to Sina, one of the major Web portals in China.

The planned listing comes at a tricky time for Weibo, as microblogging is seemingly in decline because of competition from the more private mobile messaging apps like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, or weixin, in China.