[photopress:IT_Baidu_on_Nokia_aphones.jpg,full,alignright]Baidu, the Chinese search engine, had its stock plunge $51 in one day. If it had happened in some American companies in 1929 there would have been a lot of jumping from windows. Robin Li, the head of Baidu, remained calm. After all Baidu’s shares on Nasdaq are still up an incredible 174% up for the year.
The drop came because JPMorgan analyst Dick Wei predicting that the company would report quarterly earnings on October 25 slightly below earlier predictions because of the temporary closures of some Internet data centers for technical reasons.
Even so he expects the price to rise to $400 by the end of next year. The price drop reflects the fickleness of the stock market which, once again, has become a gambling casino.
A more important question is whether Google is catching up with Baidu? Dick Wei, making sure he has an each way bet, said, ‘From a 12-month perspective, we expect Baidu to further consolidate its leading position and increase its monetization rate from growing traffic.’
(An article in the New York Times last year that Google would swamp Baidu by being more relevant. Do not hold your breath waiting for this to happen.)
Baidu has also launched it first operation outside China, a service in Japan. It has also launched BaiduTV, which enables the company to sell video ads
According to a new report from Comscore, Baidu is now ahead of Microsoft in search-engine popularity. Not just in China, but globally. There were 3.3 billion searches done via Baidu in August, compared to just 2.2 billion for Microsoft’s sites.
Nokia has built software into a phone as seen in our illustration. Four of Baidu’s most popular services, including Web Search, News Search, Image Search and Baidu Post Bar, a popular Baidu online community discovered by Baidu, are provided in the application.
The suggestion has been made that if Beijing insists on the companies censoring the Net, the Americans could just threaten to leave. So what? China may not care about Googling something as long as they can Baidu it.
Source: BusinessWeek
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