This Indian start-up is the engine in Baidu’s search for the next billion

Chinese internet giant Baidu’s next big market is India. Interested in fast-growing markets where it can score, Baidu has been in search of the elusive next billion. And helping the company in its efforts is an Indian start-up.

From advising it to converting into English some of the Mandarin pages the search engine hosts so as to reach a wider audience, to promote Indian universities and colleges in China, right down to helping India’s hospitality industry get a share of 97.2-million Chinese outbound travellers, the Indian company has got some of the aspects covered.

Apps Discover Technologies, a digital ad network marketing company, has exclusively partnered with Baidu. Aiming to provide Chinese traffic to Indian advertisers and brands, the alliance was meant to enable Indian companies promote their business in China.

“After dealing with them for some time, we realised this business alliance could create a burgeoning business opportunity for corporates on either side,” Ashish Bahukhandi Founder and CEO of Apps Discover Technologies, told BusinessLine .

Tourism sector

Some 66 million Chinese travellers tend to use an online medium to plan their trips. Of the 97.2-million outbound travellers, data show that 42.4 million tend to use Baidu.

Given that Chinese travellers are ranked top spenders on a per-trip and per-night basis, Bahukhandi decided to push Indian travel opportunities and destinations to an audience hungry for something new.

With Baidu’s wide coverage and reach — the search engine boasts of a daily page view exceeding 12 million — the start-up decided to on-board Indian advertisers to offer the tremendous variety and richness of India’s innumerable tourist destinations.

As of now, some of the advertisers emphasising India’s rich cultural heritage and scenic destinations with Baidu are travel company Cox & Kings’ online travel site Ezeego1; Kairali; travel website Yatra (Travel Guru); hospitality major The Lalit; and Ixigo, a travel marketplace.

Incidentally, Baidu has an enormous data pool, with over 30 million registered users and 7 million of them active. It also has a comprehensive influencing channel and can reach potential customers before, during and after the trip via different channels.

Citing data from the World Travel Organisation and the European Travel Commission, Bahukhandi said that many “Chinese tourists, even those who have a low income level, tend to spend around 53 per cent of their disposable income on travel, excluding spending on necessities.”

Tourist arrivals

Exploiting this was paramount. Official data showed that around a million Chinese travellers visited India in 2016. Compare this to a survey conducted by BBC in 2015, which showed that only about 3 per cent of India’s 7 million foreign tourists in 2014 were from China.

This year, tourist arrivals from China to India are expected to cross 1.4 million. Noting that India had the highest number of foreign tourist arrivals crossing the 10-million mark in 2017, the CEO said the jump helped push the country’s earnings to over $27 billion.

This was a heady number which needed to be capitalised on. In terms of education too, the Indian company is hoping to ramp up sales for Indian universities and educational institutions.

Currently, around 2,000 Chinese students are studying in India, whereas China has 18,171 Indian students. Apps Discover aims to increase the number of Chinese students in India by promoting the excellent record of India’s vast pool of universities and educational institutions.

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