Sohu to sell minority Sogou stake to Alibaba

Sohu.com (SOHU.NASDAQ) will sell a minority stake in search engine Sogou to Alibaba Group (1688.HK), Bloomberg reported. Sohu will sell a 16% stake in Sogou to Alibaba and a fund owned by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, and a separate 16% stake to a fund led by Sohu Chairman Charles Zhang. The deal is expected to help Alibaba expand in the domestic search market; Sogou is China’s third-most popular search engine after Baidu (BIDU.NASDAQ) and Google (GOOG.NASDAQ), but it commands just 0.8% market share. Analysts expect Alibaba’s resources to help Sogou to capture a larger slice of the market. Revenues for China’s search engines reached US$1 billion in 2009.