Don't hang up on Baidu
This promises to be an interesting week for China's leading search engine in terms of its mobile initiatives.
"We have a few partnerships coming up and will announce it in a week," Wang Jing -- Baidu's vice president of engineering and head of mobile -- told Reuters on Friday.
The dot-com darling teamed up with Dell
Baidu following Google
We knew that an updated Baidu Yi would be called Baidu Cloud last week, but now we're starting to see why. Sources are telling The Wall Street Journal that the new, entry-level smartphones will play nice with Baidu's services, complete with 100 gigs of cloud storage.
China is obviously a big market. There are already 356 million mobile customers in the world's most populous nation. However, seeing them flock to Android smartphones or higher-end Apple
As a hometown hero, Baidu is going to have no problem drawing consumers to Baidu Cloud if the partners are solid and the service is priced right. The company commands 78% of the search market, so people are more than familiar with the company, its website, and its portal services.
If Baidu is able to land more than a single major handset manufacturer and more than one of China's leading wireless carriers it would be easy to see the market warm up to Baidu after turning away on the heels of a disappointing first-quarter report.
Baidu is getting a callback! Let's see how it answers.
Bullish on Baidu
A bullish call on Baidu has served me well on Motley Fool CAPS over the years. True to the CAPScall initiative, I'm not going to give up on it now. Baidu has soared 1,389% since I recommended it to Rule Breakers newsletter subscribers six years ago, but now it's time to discover the next Rule-Breaking multibagger. It's a free report. Want it? Get it.