by LI JING
Robin Li, Baidu’s founder and CEO PHOTO/Kevin Krejci
BEIJING – Recently there has been a rumor that Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, was interested in acquiring Yahoo. Robin Li, Baidu founder and CEO denied the rumor, saying the company wasn’t thinking about buying up “another large company.” Indeed, Baidu is much larger than its American counterpart — and worth much more: Baidu’s market value is currently estimated around $39 billion, while the long-established Yahoo is at $18.7 billion.
Robin Li’s focused and driven attitude are the major reasons why Baidu holds an 80% share of the Chinese search engine market. Its total revenue for 2011 was of $2.3 billion, an increase of 83.2% from the previous year.
Even in the current prosperous conditions, Li likes to remind his staff: “We are only 30 days away from bankruptcy right now.” He notes that in a global economy and in the “most treacherous industry,” where capital flows relentlessly and the consumers have many different choices, to survive and to be on top of technological changes, we have to act like we are “treading on a thin layer of ice at all times.” Li is a man filled with a permanent sense of crisis.
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