Taking different roads
As competition over mobile mapping heats up, Baidu has responded by turning its map app into something like an O2O service bazaar.
Along with basic functions such as positioning services and route-planning, Baidu Maps users can hail rides with Uber, locate nearby restaurants, order food and buy movie tickets through the app.
Baidu will integrate its search and maps services with transaction services to take ground on the O2O battlefield, Baidu Chairman and CEO Li Yanhong vowed last October.
Pairing maps with transaction services abroad is now one of Baidu's major goals. The company intends to cover more than 150 countries and regions by the end of 2016.
Baidu also plans to partner with online travel agencies and offline merchants and restaurants around the world to offer hotel reservations and coupon information, a company press release said.
The strategy is a bid to meet the growing needs of Chinese travelers when they go abroad, said Zhang Xu, an industry analyst with Analysys International.
Chinese travelers made 120 million visits overseas in 2015, up 12 percent, according to data from the China National Tourism Administration.
By contrast, AutoNavi has pinned its hopes on its LBS+ strategy, an open platform for location-based services.
As a company that has been engaged in the LBS sector for more than 12 years, AutoNavi has set a goal to provide better services for O2O service developers with LBS+, Wei Kaiming, head of the LBS+, was quoted in an AutoNavi Weibo post in June 2015.
Yu Yongfu, who was appointed by Alibaba as AutoNavi's president in March 2015, has also made several major business shifts, putting user-facing O2O services aside to focus on business-facing solutions, media reports said.
Which is better?
Xu Hui, a 29-year-old Beijing resident, has both Baidu Maps and AutoNavi installed on her smartphone. "I think they complement each other," she told the Global Times on Tuesday.
"When I need to find where I am, I put more trust in AutoNavi. But when I want to order food from nearby restaurants or call a taxi, I turn to Baidu's more convenient mapping platform."
However, a report issued by Analysys International in March found that Baidu Maps was the more popular choice.
Based on a monitor of 120 million Chinese users on the mobile front, the report said that Baidu Maps is the most frequently used, accounting for 64.4 percent of the market in terms of the length of use, followed by AutoNavi with 23.3 percent.
Although AutoNavi has created a open platform to attract third-party O2O services, "it has yet to change the thinking of people who only regard AutoNavi as a traditional mapping app that has solid demands when users cannot find their way and are really looking for help," Zhang told the Global Times on Monday.
Analysts believe competition will only grow fiercer in China's mature mobile mapping industry.
The industry's penetration rate reached 88.7 percent in 2015, a report of Guangzhou-based market consultancy iiMedia Research showed in February.
Still, it's hard for analysts to decide which one is better.
Zhang believes that Baidu Maps will continue to be the app that people use most often as it beefs up its connections with O2O services and sharpens its positioning and location finding functions.
However, Li Yi, a Shanghai-based independent Internet expert, is optimistic about AutoNavi's prospects.
"What users really look for in mapping services is precise positioning, which AutoNavi is good at," Li told the Global Times Monday. "Baidu Maps focuses too much on monetizing users via O2O services or by displaying banner advertisements."
