PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

Microsoft is eager to increase its search market share in China. Its latest move is to power China Telecom’s newly launched search engine called 114 (114.vnet.cn) via its new beta search service Windows Live Search. 114 has four vertical search besides its main web search: Forum, Blog, News and Yellowpages.

Microsoft currently trails far behind in China’s search market which is only included in a combined 3.4% search market share with many other search engines (Baidu Gaining 2006 China Search Market Share).

With this cooperation, search engine revenues will be shared between China Telecom and Microsoft on a 70-30 split in 2007 and 50-50 spilt in 2008. Microsoft will also pay China Telecom 21 million US dollar as a once-off income, though both companies refuse to confirm the figure.

I believe Microsoft real intention is digging into China Telecom’s current customer base of 25 million broadband users and over 80 million Internet users.

Posted in: China, MSN, Search Engines