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November 8, 2005
Baidu is NOT for sale !!!
Lately I have been meeting many people who are active in the Chinese web space in terms of having had a number of start-ups or holding senior positions (CEOs, CFOs) of large Internet companies here.
Naturally the topic turns to Google / Baidu and the small revenue generated by Baidu to justify their huge market cap and this being based on the predicted growth of paid search in China.
My own view up until now has been that Google should acquire Baidu, as Baidu has end user reach and Google has the advertisers, so it's a match made in heaven in my book, and so far Baidu has made NO effort to target NON Chinese speaking advertisers let alone NON chinese speaking users, and a lot of their advertisrs come from the chinese reseller route.
I am however hearing the same message over and over again in China.
Baidu is NOT for sale !
I let you work out your own reasons why this is the case, the clue is in the fact that 1 company is Chinese and 1 isn't!
Posted by shak at November 8, 2005 11:36 AM
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Comments
You're absolutely right Shak. On the surface this looks like a no brainer but Baidu is home grown and the powers that be want to keep it that way. I also think Baidu users like the idea that this is a Chinese company and if they "sold out" to Google then the users would abandon ship. dt
Posted by: David Temple at November 9, 2005 7:28 AM
There is little justification that Baidu deserves the kind of valuation. It will soon be abandoned after the hedge funds and fund managers get chewed out by their investors for owning the name. The stock is primarily held by momentum investors buying into the hype. I assume that many folks will not want to have this name showing in their portfolio at the end of the year.
Posted by: George at November 10, 2005 6:20 AM
Another difference between Baidu and Google is that Baidu's search just plain *sucks*. With Google at least you get some kind of logical ordering, so that the first result is the company homepage, or the most authoritative weblog post on the subject, or a tutorial on the program you're trying to figure out. But Baidu just returns a mess of pages that contain your search term. It's like the days of Altavista all over again.
The rub is that I don't know whether to blame this on Baidu's back-end technology, or whether to blame it on the structure of the Chinese net: dominated by mammoth, link-infested portals, BBSes hidden behind passwords, and just not very intelligent code. Hmm...
Posted by: Micah at November 11, 2005 8:54 AM