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Baidu.com Soon to Announce New Expansion Plan(SinoCast China IT Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) BEIJING, July 31, SinoCast -- Baidu.com Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU), China's largest Chinese-language Internet search service provider, is likely to unveil its latest oversea expansion plan at the Baidu World Forum in Beijing on August 9. To go international has become a key component of the company's strategy as of 2007 since it announced its Japan plan in December 2006. In fact, Robin Li, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Baidu.com, has repeatedly disclosed some information about its expansion plans about South Korea and Vietnam, publicly, stressing that his company has an edge over these markets. Having holding approximately two thirds of the Chinese market, Baidu.com owns a very strong backup toward tapping into oversea markets and it must speed up its expansion steps, industry analysts pointed out. As for Baidu.com, one of the world's few companies mastering core Internet search technologies, oversea expansion becomes its necessary method in response to the globally aggressive swelling of Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), the world's largest search engine. One consideration is that Baidu.com will be likely to invest in e-mail products in a short time and it is a reasonable move. E-mail products will become an important tool for accurate online marketing in the future and a very competitive Internet service battlefield. For instance, Google is raising its competitiveness in its e-mail service called Gmail. Another consideration is that Baidu.com will possibly make a foray into instant messaging, a lucrative and fast-growing market. It is able to rely on its currently huge user base. And a Baidu.com executive told reporters that Baidu.com would extend to e-mail and IM sooner or later, but now it did not unveil these plans officially. Established in Beijing in 1999, Baidu.com has grown into the richest and largest China-based Intern company. The outstanding growth is attributed to its state-of-the-art technology and high importance to Chinese Internet users. Taking Post.baidu.com, Baidu.com's most popular innovative Internet service in China, for example, it lets related users gather together via the same search keyword, creating an instant messaging Web community for them. So far, there have been more than 20 million medium and small companies in China but only 112,000 conduct their online marketing activities on Baidu.com. Baidu.com's sales and customer service team is educating these potential clients about the Internet and e-commerce as a torchbearer and trying to let them know the importance of search advertising. In addition, Baidu.com clinched a strategic cooperation agreement with Rock Records Co., Ltd., one of the world's Big Four music companies, after compromising with The EMI Group (LSE: EMI). Under the agreement, it is licensed to use all of Rock Records' Chinese-language songs and let Internet surfers freely audition them via Baidu MP3 Search and both sides design audition-based Web page ads, sharing revenues from advertisers. Copyright 2007 Sinocast LLC, Source: The Financial Times Limited |