Chinese Tencent Is Now Worth Almost TWICE As Much As Baidu: Close To Facebook

The Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which operates the popular WeChat smartphone messaging app and various other online services in China is now worth almost as much as Facebook Inc.

It’s market capitalization just topped US$100 billion, coming close to Facebook’s market cap of about US$103.5 billion — Tencent rival Baidu’s market capitalization is about US$50 billion.

Tencent, China’s largest internet company in terms of market capitalization, is now worth almost TWICE as much as Baidu. Wow!

The company run by billionaire Pony Ma joins six other members of Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index in the $100 billion club, including PetroChina Co. and China Mobile Ltd.

Tencent – Sohu.com Deal

Also, Mobile gaming and online chat giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. invested $448 million for a 36.5% stake in Sohu.com’s majority-owned Sogou platform.

Tencent and Sogou will jointly develop and integrate their services in areas including search and data sharing. Tencent will merge its own search unit Soso with Sogou.

China’s search engine market share:

China-based Internet service provider Baidu’s dominant share of the country’s search engine market has continued to decline, while chief rival Qihoo continued to inch upwards.

In August, Baidu’s share dipped to 63.16 percent from 64.25 percent in the previous month. Baidu topped China search engine market share with 63.16%, followed by Qihoo’s 360 with 18.23%. Sogou ranked third with 10.35% market share.

Google dropped 0.04 percent to 2.88 percent, while Bing slipped from 0.59 percent to 0.57 percent in China.