After the recent hacking of Gmail accounts in China, Google envisages leaving this new market with financial consequences.

Effectively some the human rights activist’s email accounts were hacked. Google suspect the Chinese government of being behind this attack.

This announcement by Google to stop any operations in China arrive only one day after the declaration of Hillary Clinton who was concerned about charges by Google that China is censoring web search results – “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation”.

Google’s retreat is probably welcomed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin who has publicly been against the Google activities in China since the beginning.

The possible exit of Google from China will obviously help the search engine Baidu, but only for the short term because without any serious competitor Baidu may not be driven to expand as quickly.

At the end of the day Google has a chance to change its image by becoming a company with values. This change would be probably very profitable in terms of reputation when presently we hear more and more negative press about Google’s monopoly of the online world and its omnipresence (web, phone, computer…)

Let see what happens over the next few weeks and wait for the reaction from the Chinese government

Baidu has had a very good first half of the year. This quarter Baidu has increased its revenue return by 37% when Google had a bad second quarter.

It was not easy for Baidu to increase its numbers because last year Baidu wiped out all the illegal pharmacists who were using its services. Last year revenue was down, integrity has a price…

Anyway, Baidu is doing very well in China with 74% of the market share when Google has only 20%. Google (followingits bad result from the first quarter) is not going to do better any time soon. Baidu plan to hire new staff membera in order to deal with the new clients, which shoud also improve the search engine.

Baidu will maintain its position for a long time number in China. Unlike Yandex in Russia, Baidu tries to understand its market and to improve its technologies at the same time . Even if in China it is trendier (for the moment) to use the occidental search engine Google (which is why Google is doing better in urban zones).