Baidu Breaks Ground on New International HQ – But Not in Beijing

An architect's render of Baidu's new Shenzhen campus, due to open in 2015.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s biggest search engine, has today broken ground on a new campus building that will eventually be home to 10,000 employees. Located in Shenzhen in southern Guangdong province, right on the border with Hong Kong, it’s scheduled to be ready in 2015. It is being dubbed the Baidu International Building until it gets a proper name in English. Across its two main towers it covers an area of 220,000 square meters, making it twice the size of the company’s HQ in Beijing.

It’s a huge boost for Shenzhen where Baidu currently has about 1,000 employees across sales and research and development (R&D) departments. According to CEO Robin Li, quoted in a press release, the new Shenzhen campus will expand to focus on three areas: it’ll be the main operations center for South China, its international HQ, and the center for its mobile Internet business, including ongoing R&D.

Baidu’s communications director, Kaiser Kuo, told PO that having this new campus in the south of China is a no-brainer, because:

[It] makes geographic sense, as much of our initial international focus will be in Southeast Asia), and it will be a major center for our mobile Internet business. Shenzhen, and the Pearl River Delta more generally, is a major center for mobile development, with many stakeholders in the mobile Internet ecosystem based there, including many handset vendors and manufacturers, as well as software developers.

The company’s HQ will remain in Beijing across its current three buildings, where it has 10,000 staff already. All that mention of ‘mobile,’ by the way, is likely related to Baidu’s new, Android-based Yi platform, which launched last month on its first handset, the Dell Streak Pro D43 – plus its mobile web apps and other Android and iOS apps.

Shenzhen is the hometown of Tencent (HKG:0700), the social media giant which is increasingly locking horns with Baidu as both companies push more into mobile, and as Tencent puts more resources into its Soso search engine.