China’s search engine giant Baidu is selling roughly $1billion of its shares in Ctrip, China’s largest travel-booking website, bolstering its cash on hand after a difficult year for profits, said the Financial Times.
Ctrip, which owns UK flight search engine Skyscanner and is known as Trip.com outside of China, announced on Wednesday in a stock exchange filing that it will sell 31.3 million of its Nasdaq-listed shares that are currently owned by Baidu. The sale makes up a third of Baidu’s stake in Ctrip, and Baidu will remain its largest shareholder after the sale.
Baidu has struggled to maintain its position in the “tech trinity” of China’s most-valuable tech companies alongside Alibaba and Tencent, who were faster to adapt to the mobile age. Its profits have suffered in recent years as a result of scandals over medical advertising and falling advertising revenues.