Is Google leaving China?

On January 12, 2010 Google announced that is no longer interested in cooperation with Chinese government to censor Google.cn searches and would rather withdraw from the Chinese market . After that announcement  flower started to appear on Google’s logo outside its China’s headquarters.

Illegal Flower Tribute | Author: Xhacker | Soure: wikipedia.com

Rough days for Google

It looks like everything started from so called Operation Aurora that began in mid-December 2009 and it continues till today. Google announced that it was a victim of a cyber attacks operated from China and some of its intellectual property had been stolen.  Also it has written in its blog about plans to operate a completely uncensored version of Google Search Engine in China “within the law, if at all”, and acknowledged that if this is not possible it may leave China and close its Chinese offices.

So is it Google really going to withdraw from Chinese market and give up a huge amounts of revenue?

Google lost half of its Chinese market during the last 1,5 year.  According to StatCounter Google lost over 41% of the market to Chinese Baidu between February and March 2009. Later this gap increased even more and generally from December 2008 when Google owned 98.14% of the market it dropped down to  27.76% in August 2009 so it is 70.4 % drop in eight months

Google Vs Baidu

Since August 2009 Google started to increase its market share slowly going up to averaging 41.5% over the last three months…

Decision  of leaving Chinese market would give a green light to Microsoft (Bing and Yahoo!) to conquer second largest (or possibly the largest) search engine market reaching in size $252 million USD in q2 2009 and second larges number of searches  conducted during 2009 (data according to iResearch).

It is easy to assume that Google will stay in China no matter what’s going to happen and all that is just a good PR for focusing the attention.

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