Baidu to pump 25% of R&D budget into mobile

Looks like Baidu is taking its promise to dominate the Chinese mobile space pretty damn seriously. The Chinese internet giant announced that it would be spending 25% of its research and development budget on mobile.

For an idea of just how big an investment that is, it’s worth bearing in mind that smartphones make up less than 10% of Baidu’s revenue.

“Exactly when it will become a material source I don’t know,” Baidu CEO Robin Li told the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University. “I’m in no hurry to figure that out because we know there’s lots of room for improvement”.

The big investment has already seen the company launch a number of mobile products aimed at the Chinese market. In early September, it launched an HTML 5 Android browser that it claims is ‘super fast’.

Baidu’s mobile presence also includes Baidu Yi, a Linux-based OS, which is also capable of running Android apps and a mobile search product. The latter is also included in Apple’s iOS 6.

The company is set on having its products on 80% of Android phones shipped in China by the end of the year. That’s potentially a very smart move, given the proliferation of cheap Android-based smart devices in China.

In July meanwhile it announced a partnership with Chinese social giant Sina to share search and mobile content.

The agreement saw Sina integrate Baidu search into its massively popular Sina Weibo microblogging platform. Baidu’s cloud initiative meanwhile now comes with the Weibo app pre-installed.

While Li is clearly optimistic about the future of mobile, he feels that it hasn’t quite lived up to the hype. This, he says, is largely down to the fact that people haven’t quite figured out how to properly monetise it yet.

“It’s very important for us to find the right business model for the mobile internet,” he said. “We know users love the mobile internet and we have to go with them and we have to develop things they want.”