China's biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group entered an agreement with browser developer UCWeb for a mobile search project. The company has already launched its mobile search engine named "Shenma" which is now accessible at sm.cn.
UCWeb will retain its controlling stake in the enterprise Shenma Inc., which will employ professionals who previously worked for both Google and Chinese search engine Baidu. The company's financial details were not yet announced.
Baidu remains China's biggest search service for now but the new venture may challenge the Nasdaq-listed giant which has also been investing to develop its mobile search engine. Based on reports, China will have a mobile search market worth $1.3 billion in 2014 and $2.5 billion in 2015. UCWeb operates the country's leading third-party mobile browser and Shenma has the potential to immediately grow.
China's Internet company leaders including Tencent Holdings Ltd. And Alibaba are aggressively developing its services and the Alibaba-UCWeb venture just comes in time. Alibaba already runs many of China's most popular e-commerce websites but it's still heavily investing to expand its holdings in real estate, media, social media, logistics and payment software. Tencent partnered with the country's second-largest online trading website JD.com, also venturing into e-commerce to compete with Alibaba.
Shenma is integrated with the current system of Alibaba, including the Taobao and Tmall and AliPay websites, allowing its customers to access and purchase products from these sites through the Shenma platform.
UCWeb could possibly make Shenma its default search engine on the browser app to promote it. UC Browser currently offers Google, Baidu, Taobao and Yicha with 11 language options, including English, Vietnamese, Russian and Indonesian. This is another attempt of Alibaba to expand its holdings to search as in the past few years, the company has already introduced a general search engine at s.aliyun.com and a shopping search engine named Etao.
"Mobile search has long been a top priority for Baidu and we're confident that be focusing on user needs and continuing to innovate to provide the best possible mobile search experience, we will continue to grow our market share," Kaiser Kuo of Baidu said.
China has 500 million mobile Internet users and UCWeb and Alibaba acknowledged that many Chinese are now using smartphones to go online. Many companies have also ventured into search, such as Qihoo 360 Technologies Co. in August 2012 and Tencent, which invested $448 million for search engine Sogou in September 2013.
