Reuters is reporting today that Baidu plans to invest 3 billion yuan (that’s $470.6 million) by the end of 2012 to help the nation’s small- and medium-sized business expand.
The investment will see Baidu grooming “100,000 search marketing professionals, help small- and medium-sized enterprises develop their service platforms, provide free marketing about less developed regions and help government departments in their research on business” (Reuters). The company’s plan will begin in Beijing, Shanxi, Henan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and then will expand to other provinces from there. As we noted earlier this year, the regional digital divide in China is still substantial with higher internet penetration in eastern regions while the west still has a long way to go (see map below).
A Baidu representative tells us today that SMEs account for most of its business, but there is still enormous room for growth:
While we serve something like 400 thousand customers on an annual basis, that’s just a tiny percentage—perhaps as little as one percent—of the total number of SMEs in China. This is a long-term investment, undertaken with the MIIT in accordance with its goals of helping China’s small and medium enterprises discover the power of the Internet. This will bring tremendous benefits to those businesses as well as to Baidu.
On a related note, last month we saw Baidu’s search rival (or not?) Google target SMEs in India, a nation with similar development characteristics in that it has millions of businesses, most of which have yet to take advantage of the tools that the internet offers.
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