Baidu is the Google of China and booming
Most news services concentrate, when it comes to search engines, on Google. But in China, soon to be the largest Internet market in the world, Google does not really rate. The company to watch is Baidu which is booming.Chinese Web search leader Baidu says its fourth-quarter net profits quintupled, but cautioned that revenue growth was likely to decelerate sharply in the first quarter of 2007. To look at a statement like that you can easily pass over that word ‘quintupled’. As in it became five times bigger. Not even Google in its best quarter came near that.
The Beijing-based company, known to investors outside China as ‘China’s Google’ which is a bit misleading because Baidu does what Google does but with a bit of Yahoo! and perhaps eBay thrown it. The expected first-quarter revenue of US$34 million to $35 million — shows a growth of 95% to 103%. Q4 net income for the Beijing-based company rose to $15.7 million, up from just $3 million in Q4 last year. That is staggering acceleration.
The illustration is of a movie advertised on Baidu. So it does connect to the story and it is better than yet another picture of the Baidu logo.
