Baidu racing to lead Indonesian market
百度強勢引領印尼市場

The rise of Chinese tech companies has been the major story in recent years, with many of these companies racing to expand globally, especially in Indonesia that's said to have one of the world’s biggest potential growth in this sector.

Baidu, if you’ve been on the internet in china, the name will be familiar.

They are the world’s most successful Chinese language search engine.

With a market cap over 70 billion usd, they’ve been dubbed the google of china, and now the giant, has set their sights on a new market.

"The first largest population in the world. More than 60% of the population is the young which is under 30 years, So I think this country big potential to develop the internet economy later," said Bao Jianlei, director of Baidu Indonesia.

Baidu Indonesia has just entered the market in 2013 and in less than 2 years, it’s products are now installed in 70% of all android devices in the country or in an estimated 42 million devices.

It entered the Indonesian market with a mobile first strategy and is importing popular apps from China like the Baidu Browser alongside homegrown local tools with one of the key of this runaway success is localization,

"We think if we really want to do a long term business in Indonesia market we need staff from local market and to know the user behaviour, know the business environment, absolutely that is one of the necessary things to support our further success," Bao said.

Baidu, although one of the first ones, is not alone, as companies raced to capture Indonesia’s young and tech-savvy population.

Especially Chinese companies, like Cheetah Mobile and tencent's wechat that have breakthrough successes in the mobile app sector in recent years,They're joining companies like facebook and twitter that boast one of their largest user bases in the country.

With this boom, local companies have a golden opportunity to learn from the giants of the internet world like baidu and spur a technological revolution that many analysts believes has the potential to drive the country's economy.

"Ultimately the multiplying effect to the GDP, that's what we want, the goal of creating an ICT industry in any country is to actually to create a multiplying effect, and that's simply means ICT as an industry to contribute individually to the economy, and ICT as an enabler to industries to actually help to push the contribution to the GDP from this traditional sectors," said Sudev Bangah, country manager of International Data Corporation.