Baidu’s Growing Market Share In China–A Market That Does Not Matter

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jun 8, 8:56PM EDT · Published Jun 8, 10:45AM EDT

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Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) wants to have 80% of the Chinese search market even though it does not matter. The company told Reuters that it believes that with Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) out-of-the-way its piece of the largest internet market in the world will move to 79%.

But, Google may have figured out something which is counterintuitive. The search market in China may never generate much revenue. Search ads do well in free and open markets such as the US , Japan and EU where governments do not track internet activity. In China, most people and businesses assume that their actions online are being watched.

Baidu’s entire revenue last year was $651 million, a tiny fraction of Google’s global sales. Its market cap, which it will never be able to grow into with its reliance on China, is $24 billion. Google’s market cap is $152 billion.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.