Baidu plans massive Thai marketing push

Baidu plans massive Thai marketing push

Aim to promote search engine, apps

Baidu Inc, the world's second-largest search engine company, plans to double its annual marketing investment in Thailand in 2015 as it looks to spur users of its mobile search engine and apps.

The company did not give details on the investment amount.

The Beijing-based company expects half of Thailand's population to access its search engine service and mobile apps by 2016, up from 30% in 2014.

Baidu aims for half of the world's population to access its services by 2020, said Richard Lee, global marketing director of Baidu Inc.

Demand for mobile internet access will continue to grow rapidly in developing countries, particularly in Thailand, over the next two years, he said. Mr Lee said Thailand was one of Baidu's priority footprint countries for global expansion thanks to its sound economic growth and mass of affluent young mobile internet users.

"Some 80% of Thais are expected to access the internet through mobile phones by 2016, up from 40% in 2014," he said.

Mr Lee said Baidu wanted to reposition every local operating unit as an "innovation centre" by designing and developing products and services to meet local requirements, instead of just importing Chinese-developed items to the market.

Baidu plans to commercially launch a Thai language search engine by mid-2015 after introducing a beta version in June 2014. This will give Baidu search engines in the Thai, Brazilian and Chinese markets.

A mobile search engine, location-based services and mobile internet services are the three key areas Baidu will focus on in 2015, Mr Lee said.

Baidu expects online-to-offline services, which means finding consumers online but the real consumption of services is offline, will become a key part of its growth. 

Mr Lee added only four countries have their own search engine — China's Baidu, South Korea's Naver, Russia's Yandex and the US's Google Search, Yahoo Search and Microsoft's Bing.

He said searching via voice and images could overtake existing conventional text searches over the next five years.

Artificial intelligence may also have an important role in the designing and manufacturing industries.

Mr Lee said Chinese internet firms, such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent's WeChat, would play an increasingly key role in Thailand's mobile games and social networking products and services.

Chadakorn Tanasuwankasem, operation manager of Baidu Thailand, said the company planned to spend heavily on a marketing campaign to build its brand awareness here and to reach out to the mass market.

Thailand is the company's first overseas office outside China.

After three years operating in Thailand, Baidu's PC app store has millions of active users out of 12 million total PC users in the country.

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