Baidu, once seen as China’s answer to Google, hopes for a second chance in smart vehicles ahead of secondary listing in Hong Kong
- Baidu’s US$3.1 billion secondary listing reveals how one of China’s first internet companies wants to stake a claim in China’s ever-evolving digital future
- The company’s AI cloud service has grown rapidly in recent years, with non-marketing revenue posting a 28 per cent year-on-year increase to US$1.9 billion last year
When Baidu launched its initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2005 it was widely hailed as China’s answer to Google, and it would later follow the California-based giant into the field of artificial intelligence, but today the Chinese company’s market valuation is only 6.3 per cent the size of Google’s.
Since its own listing in 2004, Google has parlayed its 90 per cent dominance of the global internet search market into an online advertisement juggernaut that pulled in US$146.9 billion last year, taking an estimated 45 per cent of every new digital advertising dollar spent.
Baidu, which solidified its position as the dominant search engine for the world’s largest internet population after Google pulled out in 2010, made about 72.8 billion yuan (US$11.2 billion) in digital advertising last year, paltry in comparison yet still the company’s primary source of revenue which has been on a declining trajectory since 2018.
Baidu’s US$3.1 billion secondary listing in Hong Kong marks the first time in 15 years that the world is getting a peek at how one of China’s first and most famous internet companies wants to stake a claim in China’s ever-evolving digital future.
Blessed by strong capital, protective state policies and an untapped market, Baidu had been one of the most valuable Chinese internet companies. The acronym BAT was coined in the early 2010s in reference to China’s top three tech firms at the time: Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings.
As cheaper smartphones and faster 4G services in the following decade became a catalyst for rapid growth in China’s mobile internet, Tencent and Alibaba (owner of the Post) seized the opportunity to develop their businesses around these new trends.