Google's Uphill Battle in China

While Google is considered too powerful in the United States – with “an online package of news, entertainment, blogs, and services drawn from all the world’s up-to-the-minute knowledge,” it is not in China.

According to iResearch, Google’s market share in China was only under 15%, down from about 25% earlier last year. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has more than 69% of market share in China’s search-engine market. No double Baidu has an upper hand against Google in China because it has a deep understanding of Chinese users and their complex languages.

Most multinational companies found the China market is hard to crack. It took long time for multinationals to learn how to do business in China. The worst defeat was eBay – it shut down its China site last December and took a back seat in Tom Online, a Beijing based Internet portal that provides wireless value-added services with no experience in online auction business. Yahoo! had been in China for seven years. It finally threw itself to Alibaba, a local e-commerce company.

However, Google is not giving up. Recently, Google is joining China Mobile to launch a mobile-search-engine business. With more than 400 million cell phone users, China is the world’s largest cellphone market. Many industry observers are betting on the fact that Google is being favored among the business professionals – “in terms of future business development, Google does have a good base in China to grow on.”

The mobile search is critical for a country that has more than 400 million mobile phone users. But I don’t see why Baidu is not doing the same. In addition, how Alibaba comes to play a role in the search engine race is not clear. Google is definitely facing an uphill battle in China.