If US has Google, China has Baidu. The company hold most of China market share. With the growing internet and technology, it changed from a mere searching site to more.
How technology developments help Baidu to grow big
Founded in 2000, Robin Li and Eric Xu started the company in a hotel room. But Li has a US patent for RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking. He used this technology for Baidu search engine.
In the era of PC, the company earned a lot from advertisements on its searching engine. But it lost interest from the market in the new era of smartphone apps.
As an effort to keep the customers in, it developed a new technology in 2016. The technology sort news content for users, based on their past behavior. So instead of searching for their favorite topic, Baidu recommends it straight on its first page.
To keep even more updated, the company has just announced a change at its business model. Starting from this quarter, it is no longer a search business, but a mobile business. Even though the company’s search-focused ad business reached 90% of revenue at peak.
This is in line with Baidu’s recent contribution in AI technology. The company keeps on injecting money to its AI RnD team. The products include self-driving, voice bots and more. Yet it is now going on a dark days after the departure of Lu Qi, the world-renown scientist.
Not just in RnD, the whole company is currently on a crisis. It reported a first ever quarterly loss since it went public on 2005 in Nasdaq. CEO Robin Li admitted this lost and reiterated the company’s strategy to “invest in return for growth”.
The total $49 M of net loss is due to the company’s excessive spent on the RnD and content cost. Content cost inflated to 47% to $917 m. It is for Baidu’s version of Netflix, iQiyi.
