Baidu, a search engine based in Beijing, has lofty ambitions. Having conquered China, it is expanding into other growing digital markets, including Brazil, Egypt and Thailand. It is also busily setting up labs to perform the kind of cutting-edge research at which Google excels . More and more, it seems, Baidu is not satisfied with simply emulating US companies at home: it wants to become the developing world's Google.
There is every reason to believe it can succeed. Baidu was itself forged in a rapidly developing country. China's digital market is vast, with more than 600 million internet users, but it also varies widely in digital literacy and infrastructure, from savvy consumers in the cities of the east to uneducated peasants in the rural west. Baidu has learned to tune itself to China's varying needs. That experience may allow it to offer services that US companies don't understand.
Baidu's prospects in the West are less rosy. The company is toxically associated with China's censorship policies, and the English-speaking part of the web is already largely spoken for.
But as Baidu enters territories that US web giants covet, we can expect some interesting culture clashes. "Made in China" versus "made in Silicon Valley" is about more than business competition. It will influence how a whole generation of people outside the West understand the world and their place in it.