Lex专栏：百度与中国搜索市场_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

Lex专栏：百度与中国搜索市场

然而，也有迹象表明百度面临日益增长的利润率压力。百度正在开发中国较小城市的市场，以支持其大部分的客户增长，这一事实意味着其客户的广告预算有所降低。上季度，每个客户的广告支出同比增长三分之一，但这是自2010年初以来的最低增长率。

A bigger challenge to margins is mobile internet search, which has surpassed desktop search for the first time. Even upbeat estimates show that Baidu holds half of the mobile search market, compared with its four-fifths share of desktop search. Ad revenues at the former are lower since browsing on a mobile is less likely to result in a purchase. Google can sympathise – the shift to mobile search has been accompanied by a fall in cost-per-click to advertisers.

利润率面临的更大挑战是移动网络搜索，它第一次超过了桌面搜索。即使根据乐观的估计，百度也只占移动搜索市场的一半，相比之下其桌面搜索占据了五分之四的市场份额。移动搜索的广告收入较低，因为手机浏览不大可能会促成直接购买。谷歌(Google)对此也有同感——随着移动搜索越来越流行，广告商的单次点击成本下降了。

Baidu trades on 19 times forward earnings, a 40 per cent premium to Google. That might be justified for now – search advertising expenditure is growing four times faster in China than the global average. Google’s retreat to Hong Kong in 2010 means Baidu is still in the best place to capture that. But gone are the days when that growth came hand in hand with fat margins.