Cheetah Mobile Bounces Up And Down On Short-Seller Report

Cheetah Mobile (NYSE: CMCM) shares fell sharply Thursday morning after short-seller Geoinvesting said the company's flagship Clean Master app was booted from Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) top free rankings on its Google Play app store site.

Short interest in Cheetah has nearly doubled in the past month to almost three million of the company's 173.7 million shares outstanding.

Cheetah, a China-based security software provider, completed its initial public offering in May and shares climbed by more than 32 percent as of Thursday afternoon.

Skipjack, Pennsylvania-based Geoinvesting claimed that daily downloads from Google Play of Cheetah's six apps have fallen by 88 percent outside China following Google's removal of Clean Master from its rankings of free offerings July 15

The alleged move by Google "calls into question growth in Cheetah's highly touted large overseas user base and future monetization potential," Geoinvesting said.

Cheetah allegedly antagonized Google because its Clean Master app encourages users to uninstall Google Chrome and replace it with CMCM's own browser.

Geoinvesting, run by Majid Soueidan and Dan David, has recently become known for its negative reports concerning Chinese companies that are traded in the United States.

Cheetah, at one point Thursday down more than four percent, has bounced back about seven percent due to some possible short covering. The stock was recently up 3.8 percent.