Zhang Yaqin, the president of Baidu in charge of the business collaboration of emerging technologies such as cloud computing and AI, was recently reported to have received a retire notice by the company, which is being interpreted by the outsiders as a signal of organizational reorganization in order to attain vitality amid the sluggish revenue growth and a slow down in the international economic forecast. Though Baidu still ranks the top in terms of domestic search engine service, it lags behind other tech peers when it comes to product innovations and users’ dwelling timespan. The market users is currently dominated and led by generation Z users who are willing to embrace novel concepts and ideas with little hesitation to pay for their interests. Emerging rivals like Bytedance, have succeeded by firstly tapping into this group and extending to the rest. Short video platform Douyin boasts more than 300 million monthly active users (MAU) in February, nearly four-fold the 79 million users on Haokan, Baidu’s short video service which launched in November 2017.
