Chinese internet company Sohu has its eyes set on a bigger slice of the China search engine market, hoping to pick up local users from a rapidly declining Google. The company’s chief executive Wang Xiaochuan told Reuters today:
Our search volumes doubled in the past year, which led to very fast growth in our revenue, and I don’t see what’s so difficult about reporting a profit next year. . . Our real aim is to overtake Google in China within a year.
| 2009Q4 | 2010Q1 | 2010Q2 | 2010Q3 | 2010Q4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baidu | 77.1% | 75.3% | 80.2% | 81.9% | 83.6% |
| 17.5% | 18.4% | 14.1% | 13.3% | 11.1% | |
| Tencent Sogo | 3.6% | 3.5% | 3.1% | 2.8% | 3.1% |
| Sogou | 1.0% | 2.0% | 1.7% | 1.3% | 1.2% |
| Bing | 0.5% | 0.5% | 0.4% | 0.3% | 0.4% |
| Others | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.5% | 0.4% | 0.6% |
Of course Google’s market share has been dropping in China, according to numbers provided by Analysis (see table right). The company has seen it’s 17.5 percent share at the end of 2009 fall to 11.1 percent a year later.
Sohu’s search engine Sogou has only been hovering at just a couple of percent, but it appears like the company aspires to rise far enough to meet Google on the way down. Sohu reportedly has plans for a Taobao optimized Sogou browser, which might actually give it a bit of a boost. According to Resonance China’s blog post earlier today:
Some shopping sites like Taobao already have their own internal search engines for users to search for target items, but the most used sites of Chinese online shoppers turns out to be search engine sites like Baidu or Google.
When we heard Sohu CEO Charles Zhang speak at the Global Mobile Internet Conference earlier this year, talked about “living on the internet” — and online shopping is definitely one aspect of our lives that the net can greatly simplify.
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