Skype Get Compeitition In China From Baidu (BIDU)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Management at Skype is under pressure from its parent Ebay (EBAY) to deliver some revenue. The company’s last 10-Q shows "communications revenue", Skype, with revenue of $89 million. Skype had 220 million registers users at the end of Q2, so the yield per is pretty poor.

Now Chinese search engine leader Baidu (BIDU) is launching an instant messaging platform that is aimed at services like GTalk and Skype. Ebay would probably not like having a competitor in the world’s most populated market. But, it will be getting one nonetheless.

Baidu plans to use its large customer base to funnel users to its IM feature.

Shanda Interactive (SNDA) also plans to launch a fully featured IM product.

China is currently the second largest PC market in the world and is already the largest handset market. Expanding competition for messaging and VoIP there could do some real harm to Skype’s revenue plans.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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