Alibaba to Invest in Chinese Search Engine Sogou

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August 13, 2010
By the ZippyCart Shopping Cart Reviews Content Team

The Alibaba Group is well known throughout Asia for their ecommerce companies like Alibaba.com, Taobao.com, and Alipay. Many people in the U.S. are familiar with the company, as Yahoo purchased a major stake in the Alibaba Group back in 2005. Over the last year, they have been working on expanding and growing via investments and acquisitions, as illustrated by their recent purchase of U.S. based ecommerce company, Vendio services. They also recently announced in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that their eyeing acquisitions in coming quarters. Now the Alibaba Group is making the news again as earlier this week they announced that they plan to buy a stake in Chinese search engine, Sogou, which is part of Sohu Inc. The exact terms of the deal are not yet finalized, but it was reported that Sohu is planning on selling a 16% stake in their Sogou search engine to Alibaba Group.

This investment is very strategic for Alibaba, as they could allow the search engine to elevate their efforts to gain market share in China. Currently the search engine scene is dominated by rival Baidu, who controls about 70% of the searches, with Google coming in second at roughly 24%. Sogou still has a long way to go if they want to give Google and Baidu serious search competition, as they only control about 1% of search. One interesting piece to the Sogou investment, is that Alibaba.com refuses to participate with their parent company Alibaba Group in the purchase. Alibaba.com does not see the value in the deal for them directly, but Alibaba Group can still move forward with the deal as it is separate from Alibaba.com