Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU), the Chinese search engine giant, has succeeded at making its place among the top ten publishers by download on Google Play with a record number of downloads made in the month of June, which helped it climb seven ranks, as revealed by the latest data from App Annie’s global index.
Battery saver, Speed Booster apps helping
While Baidu is more known for its searching capabilities, but to utter surprise the position secured by it was not because of that, but because of two performance enhancing apps. DU Battery Saver and DU Speed Booster contributed most to the jump enjoyed by Baidu, as revealed by data from App Annie.
Since September 2012, when the DU Battery Saver app was initially released it has already been downloaded more than 10 million times, informed Baidu. “Indonesia, the app’s largest country by download share, reported considerable gains after the app was featured on its Google Play homepage during the third week of June,” noted the index.
DU Speed Booster has performed considerably well in several markets, during the month of June, which include the United States, Thailand and Brazil. The users can get a boost in speed of upto 60% on their devices using DU Speed Booster, claims Baidu.
Baidu shifting to mobile platform
Free and paid, both versions of the two performance boosting apps are available for download on Google Play. Such apps help users to get want the maximum of the devices’ hardware. It must be noted that the apps are very popular in the markets where Baidu is successful, primarily, it may be because users in these regions are more inclined towards buying the low-to-mid range phones.
For the second-quarter, Baidu reported a profit of 3.55 billion yuan ($571.7 million), which is 34% more from the same period last year. According to the company, for the first time, mobile revenues accounted for over 30% of the total. The Chinese company makes most of its money from search advertising on the desktop, but has been working to shift advertisers to mobile. Baidu truly dominates the Chinese search market accounting for 75.7% of search engine queries compared to just 16.4% and 5.1%, for rivals Qihoo and Sogou, according to Bloomberg data.
