Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc (百度) yesterday announced two deals linked to the entertainment industry, including a tie-up with online retailer Amazon.com Inc to provide it with search services.
Baidu, often described as the Chinese equivalent of Google, has been seeking to leverage its online dominance in a country where most of the US search giant’s Web sites are banned.
Baidu has agreed with Amazon China (亞馬遜中國) to become the default search engine in the country for its e-book readers and also cooperate in app distribution and video content, a Baidu statement said.
Amazon will “integrate” with Baidu’s app store and online video platform iQiyi (愛奇藝), it said, which is a rival of an Internet television company newly acquired by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴).
On the same day, Baidu said it would merge its music business with one of China’s biggest music rights holders, Taihe Entertainment Group (太合娛樂), which covers Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore.
Taihe holds original rights to more than 10,000 compositions and 700,000 recordings, the statement showed.
The deal marked the latest in a string of mergers and acquisitions by China’s top three Internet firms.
At the end of October, Baidu took the lead in the online travel sector after two of China’s largest online travel firms — Baidu-controlled Qunar.com (去哪兒網) and Ctrip.com (攜程網) — agreed to a share swap and partnership deal to create the nation’s biggest Internet travel service.
Two weeks prior to that deal, Alibaba announced plans to buy outstanding shares of Youku Tudou Inc (優酷土豆), the nation’s equivalent of YouTube, in a deal estimated to be worth US$4.8 billion.
INVESTOR RESILIENCE? An analyst said that despite near-term pressures, foreign investors tend to view NT dollar strength as a positive signal for valuation multiples Morgan Stanley has flagged a potential 10 percent revenue decline for Taiwan’s tech hardware sector this year, as a sharp appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar begins to dent the earnings power of major exporters. In what appears to be the first such warning from a major foreign brokerage, the US investment bank said the currency’s strength — fueled by foreign capital inflows and expectations of US interest rate cuts — is compressing profit margins for manufacturers with heavy exposure to US dollar-denominated revenues. The local currency has surged about 10 percent against the greenback over the past quarter and yesterday breached
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