UCWeb head slams Baidu for alleged business interference

Yu Yongfu, chief of Beijing-based UCWeb Inc, a major mobile browser provider backed by Alibaba Group Holding, directed his fire at the country's dominant search engine Baidu on Monday, accusing Baidu of having maliciously tampered with its browser and search engine following UCWeb's recent launch of a mobile search engine.

The marketplace for mobile search is hardly a natural extension of the PC search market, but a completely new track to race on, Yu, chairman and CEO of UCWeb, said while delivering a speech at the Global Mobile Internet Conference held in Beijing on Monday.

The number of monthly active users of the company's newly launched mobile search engine, sm.cn, has exceeded 100 million so far, bringing its penetration rate to more than 20 percent in the domestic mobile search engine market, according to Yu.

The new mobile search engine was jointly announced by UCWeb and e-commerce giant Alibaba on April 28, in what was seen as a move to rival Baidu Inc and Tencent Holdings which have a strong presence in the mobile Internet arena.

UCWeb reportedly holds 70 percent of the new joint venture, while Alibaba has the remainder.

Yu said Baidu made several tampering attempts, for instance, when people used UCWeb's browser to go on Baidu's website for search services, the site would automatically show a popup that advised users to download Baidu's browser.

Baidu's attack is unprecedented, noted Yu, and is an indication that Baidu, China's search engine leader, is feeling some pressure from UCWeb's foray onto its turf. Baidu has yet to respond to Yu's claims.

The latest statistics shows that Baidu retains a huge chunk of China's mobile search market. In the fourth quarter of 2013, Baidu took 72.1 percent market share in terms of search traffic, while easou.com and Tencent's soso.com held the No.2 and No.3 spots, respectively, with market share of 17 percent and 7.2 percent, according to data released in mid-March by Beijing-based Internet consultancy Analysys International.

Yu said that Baidu's current dominance based on the transplanting of its existing business model that prevails on PCs to the mobile Internet won't be sustainable, citing the Finnish handset maket Nokia, which was once the cellphone king but ended up declining in the smartphone world.

By the end of 2013, about 500 million Chinese netizens were using mobile phones to access the Internet to account for 81 percent of the country's total online population, the China Internet Network Information Center said in a report published in January, in a sign of continued growing popularity of the mobile Internet.