Baidu: 1,000% Growth in Mobile Searches in China in Past 2 Years [STATS]

The quarterly mobile reports from Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s most used search engine, are always full of facts and stats about growing mobile usage among Chinese netizens. The newest report came out today, revealing lots of new milestones.

Prime among these is the fact that Baidu has seen a 1,000 percent increase (UPDATED to correct my percentage) – yes, an 11-fold rise – in mobile visits to its search engine from the start of 2010 to December 2012:

How did Baidu collect this data? A representative explains to us:

The data for this report was collected through Baidu mobile search results (including app-driven searches, searches through pre-installed search tools, and browser-based searches); Baidu Mobile App Center (as.baidu.com); and Baidu mobile analytics.

More mobile searches than ever were met with mobile-optimized websites in China, with Baidu saying that 80.02 percent of searches went to mobile-adapted sites in Q4 of last year – that’s up from 69 percent in Q3. Baidu itself has been pushing this, launching a service called SiteApp a few months ago to form simple mobile sites for businesses.

Focusing on companies with medium- to large-scale websites, Baidu found that 47.8 percent of those now have mobile websites:

Not shown on that graph is that 16.9 percent of large and medium websites have developed native mobile apps, while 5 percent of such sites have mobile-optimized sites developed using HTML 5.

China’s mobile searches