Page 32 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

I can’t wait to meet Li and find out what he has that Google’s best and
brightest haven’t been able to beat. At Baidu’s headquarters in Beijing, the
elevator rises swiftly. The doors open to a bland space filled with rows of
cubicles. Baidu could take a lesson from Google’s cool-looking campus in
Mountain View. I’m shown into a conference room with a distant view of
Beijing University, where Li graduated in 1991 with a degree in information
management. In strides Li, trimmer and shorter than I imagined. Walking pur-
posefully across the room, he shakes my hand and introduces himself softly:
“Hi, I’m Robin Li.” He says it humbly, with no trace of the arrogance com-
monly found among the Larry Ellisons of the United States.
I’m surprised by how reserved he is. An entrepreneurial antihero who has
been schooled in the “show no chrome” Chinese culture, Li acknowledges that
his success has far outstripped his wildest fantasies. “My dream was to make
a technology or product that would be used by as many people as possible. I
never thought I would be managing
a company this size,” he says,
“I can’t predict how big the market will be in sounding overwhelmed by the 750-
China, but I have no doubt that we will be- plus employees he now oversees.
come bigger than Google.” Li is convinced that Baidu is
Robin Li, poised to surpass its American rival
cofounder, chairman, and CEO, Baidu and become the world’s biggest
search engine company within 10
years. “The search engine market
in China is still small compared to
the developed world. Our revenues are a very small fraction of Google’s,” he
explains. “I can’t predict how big the market will be in China, but I have no
doubt that we will become bigger than Google,” he says emphatically.
In China, Baidu is the leading Web site, far outdistancing the seventh-
ranked Google. Globally, Baidu is midget-sized compared to the giant Google.
Li’s search engine ranks seventh among the top Web sites in the world, right
1
after the powerhouses Yahoo!, MSN, and YouTube. Baidu’s revenues will more
than double in 2007 but will barely tip the scales at a mere $224 million, up
from $107 million in 2006, says the former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy,
compared with Google at $12.6 billion for 2007, up from $10.6 billion in 2006.

6 SILICON DRAGON