Machine translation companies may be on Baidu’s M&A radar. Baidu, China’s largest search engine operator, intends to ramp up investments in supercomputing capabilities. “Voice recognition, picture recognition, machine translation, deep learning and neural networks and all those things will make us competitive in the long term, and in the short term, too,” Baidu President Zhang Yaqin said.
Zhang said in an interview with Bloomberg TV that they are prepared to do more deals within the supercomputing space to become more competitive. “We really look at our product service to be the core strategy,” Zhang said, “M&A and partnerships will be part of that strategy, and we’ll continue to look at that. And then look at JVs and investments.” He added that they are in talks with “many potential [M&A] targets.”
Baidu is stepping up its deal-making to out-invest and out-acquire competitors like Alibaba and Tencent for leadership in the online-to-offline space (O2O). Chinese e-commerce giants are moving into O2O, which is estimated to grow into a $1.2 trillion market by 2017, according to Shanghai-based IResearch. O2O is the high-tech business strategy that draws online customers to physical (offline) stores.
