In this text you can find the information about the history and some interesting facts of the IT-brand Baidu from China.
Content:
1. Baidu brand story
2. Baidu brand today
Baidu is a Chinese company that launches various web products to the Chinese market, the main one being a search engine with the same name. In the world market, the search engine occupies 1.06%, for comparison, Google occupies 92%.
The main office of the company is located in Beijing, and it is registered in the Cayman Islands. The main share of income for the Baidu brand comes from the Chinese market - 98%. Repeated attempts to enter other markets were unsuccessful. In addition to the search engine, Baidu has its own online encyclopedia, which in its time surpassed the Chinese Wikipedia in popularity.
Baidu brand history
Baidu was founded in 2000. Its creators are Robin Lee and Eric Xu. While living in the US, Robin wrote a program which algorithms made it possible to rate websites. In the future, this algorithm will become the basis of the search engine. The first capital was received from American investors and amounted to $1.3 million. But, the startup in America did not have much success. After receiving an invitation from the Chinese government, Robin went to Beijing, where Baidu was founded.
A year later, Baidu received another $10 million investment. Baidu products were offered to all successful Chinese Internet resources in the form of paid applications. But this did not bring large incomes, and the buyers of the products did not want to pay extra for improving the system. The financial situation was deteriorating and in order to remedy the situation, it was decided to create and launch a search engine. With the support of the Chinese authorities, the Baidu search engine quickly became popular and took a leading position among other Chinese competitors.
- In 2004, the Baidu search engine occupied 95% of the Chinese market, effectively becoming the sole leader.
- In 2005, thanks to the successful development, the brand's shares appeared on the NASDAQ stock exchange. After they were placed, a ten-year-old record was broken - at the end of trading, the value of the shares increased 5 times.
- In 2007, Baidu shares were included in the NASDAQ-100 index.
- In 2008, Chinese media accused Baidu of placing a large number of ads on the search engine from scammers who pretended to be medical graduates. Most of the ads have been removed, but the company's reputation has already suffered, and its shares have fallen 60 points. To remedy the situation, Robin Lee issued a public apology in the press, and all the guilty workers were also fired. To prevent the problem from happening again, Baidu created a special service called the Phoenix Nest. It checks advertisers. Also here you can ask for help from specialists in creating your ad. The emergence of a new advertising platform significantly improved the company's position in the Chinese market.
- In early 2010, the search network was hit by a powerful hacker attack. It was a group of cybercriminals who called themselves the "Iranian Cyber Army". As a result, DNS records were changed, and traffic was redirected to a third-party site. The company's specialists dealt with the problem quickly.
- At the end of 2012, Baidu acquired shares in the online video service iQIYI
- In 2018, the company placed part of its shares with an “IQ” ticket, which subsequently brought it $2.5 billion in revenue.
- In 2019, the Baidu brand ranked 297th in the Forbes Global Global Companies list.
- In early 2021, the company began working with automaker Geely to build smart cars.
Baidu brand today
Robin Li has repeatedly stated in his numerous media appearances that Baidu's main goal is to become the world's leading search engine. But in fact, the situation does not look so great - the Baidu search engine cannot conquer even the Asian market, not to mention the global one. But it is possible that the situation will change in the very near future.
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