31 July 2015.
The Chinese tech company Sohu has seen strong growth in the last quarter, while its main rival Baidu has seen a slump in profits.
Sohu's revenues increased 8% compared to the last quarter, compared to Baidu's 3% growth over the same time period.
Looking specifically at the company's search engine Sogou, a spokesperson said: “In the second quarter, Sogou continued to see decent growth across all operating metrics. In particular, mobile search traffic jumped by more than 110% year-over-year and nearly caught up with PC traffic. Second-quarter revenues reached 147 million US dollars, up 62% year over year and 17% quarter-over-quarter.”
This is compared to Baidu, which has seen slower than expected growth of 3%. Baidu's Chief Financial Officer has explained that profits have been offset by higher spending in areas such as its online-to-offline services.
Online-to-offline services are those which allow users to do a real-world activity online, such as taxi-hailing and ticket-booking apps.
Baidu has been investing heavily in online-to-offline services in response to the increasing proportion of Chinese users accessing the internet from a mobile device.
