Baidu! boss! says! no! to! Yahoo! gobble!
Chinese search giant has eyes on Apple's iOS
Posted in Management, 26th March 2012 10:46 GMT
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Baidu.com boss Robin Li has said the Chinese search giant will not buy troubled web biz Yahoo!
Baidu hopes to grow its share of China's search market, as well as expand abroad, by building a bang-up HQ in Beijing. However, at the IT Leadership Summit in Shenzhen at the weekend Li denied a big money swoop for Yahoo! was on the cards.
Digital China Federation chairman Wu Ying had suggested during a panel debate that Baidu – which at $39bn is valued at more than twice Yahoo!'s $18.7bn – could easily afford the web pioneer, according to Xinhua (Chinese).
If a deal did go through, Baidu could neutralise its rivals by snapping up the 40 per cent stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba that Yahoo! owns and cause Chinese internet portal behemoth Tencent to sweat bullets.
However, Baidu CEO Li said he was not preoccupied with killing off his competitors and added, rather cryptically, that he doesn’t consider Alibaba and Tencent as Baidu’s main rivals. Another reason for maintaining the status quo is to ensure that Baidu remains neutral in the search space, which is why the company has focused on this space alone for many years, he added.
Yet Baidu is planning a major expansion of its activities, with Li explaining in an earnings call that he wants the firm to push on in mobile and social, two areas that would expand the firm beyond its core competence of search.
The firm is also looking to expand into Brazil, a nation where Google has an almost total monopoly.
In fact a swoop for Yahoo! would make sense given the latter’s relatively strong presence in China and its reportedly on-off deal to sell its assets in the country to Baidu rival Alibaba.
It would also raise Baidu’s stature on the international stage, something it has singularly failed to do despite thumping Google in its domestic market.
Reports in China suggest that Apple is about to announce a tie-up that will see Baidu offered as the default web search service for iOS users - a move that will surely be interpreted as a massive two fingers to the Chocolate Factory. ®
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COMMENTS
Re: Would make sense for Apple
D'oh. Please ignore my stupid comment. I had an iPhone for two years, and I never saw that option (not that I ever felt the need for it).
Re: Would make sense for Apple
Choice? You mean by going to Settings > Safari > Search Engine on an iPhone, which allows Google, Yahoo! or Bing to be set as the preferred search engine? How about doing a little research before leaping on to the anti-Apple bandwagon eh?
Makes sense
Not really pointing the finger at Google. Baidu is large in China so it makes sense to use Baidu especially as the Great Firewall makes surfing non-China resident sites quite a bit slower. Just like Facebook and Twitter would default to the Chinese largest market share equivalents. It just makes sense in much the same that there is no point defaulting to Baidu in the UK or US.
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