blog.thomaspan.com

At the last Tuesday night, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu.com, came and shared with us the Baidu story. At the beginning of the event, led by Qi Lu, Executive Vice President of Yahoo! Inc. and President of HYSTA, we had a special moment dedicated for these deeply affected by China earthquake that devastated thousands of people in Sichuan Province, China. Around the same time, Baidu.com, as the No.1 web site in China, has acted quickly, helping people save lives and donate for quake victims. The same night, along with a 2 million RMB donation, Robin has urged the company to use its unbelievable penetration, including millions of Chinese web surfers and thousands of affiliates, to help these devastated by the quake. One amazing story came about the same time when a female student, Qi Zhang, helped military find the best helicopter landing spot near the epicenter by posting online. It simply reflects how the Internet is shaping China and how Baidu is riding the China Internet dragon better than ever.

Here, let’s review some basic facts. China reached the magic mark at the end of February this year. With 221 million Internet users, China surpassed US to become #1 country in Internet users. However, the Internet penetration in China is only 16 percent – below the world average of 19.1 percent, and well below that in US of approximately 50 percent. Maintaining 70% of the search market share in China, Baidu.com has another 3125% to grow when the Internet penetration rate in China reaches 50%. No wonder, Baidu.com’s stock is very hot in NASDAQ. As Robin has pointed out in his speech, China annual GDP growth is about 8% ~ 9%, advertisement revenue in China grows at 15% ~ 20%, online advertisement doubles overall advertisement revenue with the yearly growth rate at 40%, China search market advances with a 80% year-to-year growth and Baidu tops all at 160%.

Robin’s success wasn’t occasional. His focus is dead-on: search. He worked on search since college. As a staff engineer in Infoseek, he wrote a book in Chinese, in which he analyzed business cases in IT industry for late 90’s. Even he, himself, keeps referencing the book when facing challenges in business. Sharp business sense combined with his talent and focus in search, the success of Baidu.com is his to lose. Let’s expect Baidu.com to achieve more successes under his lead in China as well as in Japan!