Chinese Search Engine Baidu Gets in Gear
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Written By Reprise Media | July 20, 2005 | Share This
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Nearly a year after the Google went public, Baidu is poised to be the next dot com company in the spotlight.
Its July 12th filing attracted a lot of attention from investors impressed with the Chinese-language Internet search site, which is ranked #2 in China and #6 in the world in terms of traffic. Even though the company is still in its early states, its already indexed nearly 700 million web pages, 80 million images files, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu also features news, message boards, and other content.
Investors will be interested to know that Google invested in Baidu last June. Since then Google CEO Eric Schmidt has travelled to China to visit with Baidu, fueling speculation that the search giant plans to make a bid for the company.
It wouldn’t be an unattractive proposition, especially given today’s news that Baidu will be offering up to 3.7 million American depositary shares (ADS) for between $19 and $21 each in an initial public offering, giving the company an initial marketing capitalization of around $634 million.
Not only is Baidu poised to rake in the dough, but they’re also not going to not pull any punches with online pirates. This article tells of the company’s plans to delete thousands of links to Internet sites offering pirated music.
What’s weirdest? The fact that music retailers can’t make it legitimately in China anyway:
“The problem for the music industry in a country such as China is its sheer size, and it is unlikely that any retailer could cover every single region,”
says Chinese media & technology expert Salman Momen.
Topics: International |