Microsoft’s Bing Gains Search Engine Partner On Chinese Mainland

Microsoft’s search engine product Bing has formed an alliance with Shenzhen Winhi.net to jointly promote Bing in China.

Microsoft reportedly reached a one-year agreement with Winhi.net in August 2010, making the latter Bing’s exclusive agency in Guangdong and its first strategic cooperation partner in China.

According to reports in local media quoting Huang Dinglong, Microsoft Bing’s manager for search product, Microsoft is attracted by Winhi.net’s rich operating experience in the Chinese e-commerce and online promotion fields, as well as its over 30,000 quality small- and medium-sized enterprise clients.

In July 2009, Microsoft acquired Yahoo’s search business and gained all its clients, but Microsoft’s business expansion in the Chinese search market is far from satisfactory. Since Microsoft Bing was launched in China synchronously with the global market in June 2009, it has gained no more than 2.4% share in the Chinese market.

Statistics released by the market search firm Analysys International show that in the first half of 2010, the scale of the Chinese search engine operator market reached CNY4.62 billion, a year-on-year increase of 45%. After Google, which previously was the second largest search engine operator in China, left the Chinese mainland market, filling the void it left has become the focus of the competition in the Chinese search engine market.