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Baidu raising $2 billion

Written by Mark Evans
29/01/2018

Baidu, the Chinese search engine, is looking to prospective investors in an attempt to raise $1.5 to 2 billion.

The money is earmarked for the Chinese company’s finance unit, Baidu Financial Services Group (Baidu FSG) that runs online payment and wealth management system Baidu Wallet. At the moment the company lags behind Chinese rivals Alibaba and Tencent in financial services and it needs to make up ground.

Alibaba’s Ant Financial is valued at $60 billion and Tencent operates WeChat Pay with many hundred million users. Baidu Wallet, has only 100 million accounts.