Business / Gadgets

Baidu to make more acquisitions in mobile in 2014

By Meng Jing (China Daily) Updated: 2014-02-28 08:22

Baidu Inc, China's most-used search engine, is expected to make more acquisitions to boost its mobile business, a move intended to capture growth in the rapidly changing Internet landscape.

Baidu to make more acquisitions in mobile in 2014

Baidu's profits flat on marketing costs

Internet finance is in, but is banking out?

The United States-listed company saw its investment in mobile in 2013 pay off with mobile accounting for more than 20 percent of Baidu's total revenues in the fourth quarter of last year, said the company, which announced its unaudited finance report early on Thursday.

Baidu intends to grow the share because it sees tremendous opportunities beyond search, the company's core and dominant business.

"Whenever there is the opportunity to undertake an acquisition to buy us either time or resources or talent, we will be open for that," Robin Li, chief executive officer of Baidu, said in a conference call after Baidu announced its revenue jumped more than 50 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2013.

The company is preparing to deploy cash aggressively wherever necessary with a disciplined approach, said Jennifer Li, chief financial officer of Baidu.

Robin Li didn't specify a list of companies in which Baidu wants to invest. But Baidu has singled out four strategic areas in which it is interested in terms of continuing to build the company's leading position in China's Internet world. The four areas are mobile and cloud, location-based services, customer products, such as gaming and music, and international operations.

In China, where more than 5 billion people have access to the Internet through mobile phones, going mobile is seen as a core strategy for all of the country's three Internet giants: Baidu Inc, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.