Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, has growing ambitions in India

Chinese tech giant Baidu, maker of the country’s most popular search engine, is in search of something itself. It wants fast-growing markets where it can leap in. If it’s in search of the next billion, there’s only one place it can go – India.

Baidu already has a “modestly-sized team” in India, says Josh Fenn, who does global marketing for the firm. That’s in the New Delhi office which opened in September. “There’s a lot of room for us to grow, and we want to grow,” he adds.

Mobile phone users in Tamil Nadu, India. Photo credit: Stefano Ravalli

For now, Baidu’s ambitions in India don’t include its search engine. Instead, it’s trying to grow a user base for mobile apps like MoboMarket (an alternative to Google Play), DU Battery Saver, and DU Speed Booster. The company’s stated goal is to “build a robust ecosystem of mobile products and services in India.” That may eventually extend to launching the search engine in India, just as Baidu did in Brazil back in July 2014. So far, Brazil is Baidu’s only non-Chinese search engine market.

India has just over 300 million mobile internet users.

Several other Chinese companies are expanding globally in a similar way by peddling those kinds of free utility apps that have ads, such as Cheetah Mobile and Sungy Mobile. Both those firms have IPO’d on the back of their suite of free apps. Cheetah is worth US$2.3 billion on the New York Stock Exchange; Sungy was pegged at US$1.4 billion in its US IPO in 2013, then it opted to go private at the end of last year. All that money makes sense when you realize that 60 percent of mobile ad spending is going into utility apps.

Mobile first

The bigger picture is that India is a mobile-first country. People are bypassing the PC and laptop era altogether as more and more Indians get online – just over 300 million at the last count, with an anticipated 371 million by the next count in June.

Baidu’s latest move, revealed today, is to add five Indian languages to its MoboMarket app, in addition to the English and Hindi it already supports. Those five tongues – Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Telugu – are spoken by 33 percent of the population, according to an Indian Ministry of Home Affairs census, making them collectively almost as important as Hindi (41 percent).

While Baidu wants to reach more of India, the company is not researching Hindi or any other Indian language at its Singapore R&D center, opened mid-2012, which is focusing on natural language processing technology. Instead, that lab is working on Southeast Asian languages like Thai. That syncs with Baidu’s initial target of doing well with its apps in young markets like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

But the regional expansion has not always gone well. Simmering anger in Vietnam at China and its growing power contributed to Baidu giving up on the country after launching several websites in Vietnamese.

See: For Chinese tech companies venturing overseas, China is a toxic brand