NEWS ALERT: China s Search Giant Sogou on the Countdown to IPO

(Chinese Version)

Sohu announced on Monday that it had submitted registration filings to SEC over the IPO of its internet search subsidiary Sogou, the third biggest search engine in China. The number of shares and the size of the IPO are yet to be determined, but Sohu revealed that as long as the market conditions permitted, the IPO would commence as soon as possible.

According to Sohu’s 2017 Q2 financial report, Sogou contributed to nearly half of Sohu’s Q2 revenue ($211 million among $461 million). Compared with the previous year, Sogou’s revenue increased by 20 per cent; compared with Q1, its revenue rose by 30 per cent.

In September 2013, Tencent invested $448 million in Sogou and merged Soso, QQ Input with Sogou’s businesses and hold 36.5 per cent stake in the renewed Sogou after the merger. As of June 30th, 2016, Tencent replaced Sohu and became the biggest shareholder of Sogou, holding as much as 45 per cent stake. However, Sohu and Sohu’s management board are allowed to continue to hold the biggest voting power over Sogou.

Later, Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, sent an internal letter to all Sogou staff and further confirmed the IPO. In the letter, Wang said that Sogou was no longer struggling for survival. Instead, he pointed out that the future of Sogou lie in if it could “achieve breakthrough in search business and lead future innovation in AI”.

Wang maintained that while Sogou’s rivals were still busy finding an appropriate business strategy, Sogou had already been geared towards future and played a key role in AI, big data and IoT. Next, Sogou shall continue its effort in AI, especially language processing, Wang revealed.

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Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost. 

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