CLARO CORTES IV/REUTERS/CORBIS
Robin Li
Baidu
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer might want to have a sit-down with Chinese entrepreneur Robin Li. The founder and CEO of Chinese search engine Baidu.com has achieved something that Microsoft's top brass have yet to manage--beating Google. By far China's No.1 search engine, Baidu has a 62% market share, more than double Google's. And Baidu widened its lead over the Americans in 2006, despite Google's efforts to boost its China operation. Li, 38, has had his problems, including lawsuits alleging Baidu's involvement in click-fraud. But Baidu denies wrongdoing. Its NASDAQ-listed stock is up over 80% this year.
In contrast to China's typically brash Internet entrepreneurs, Li comes across as softspoken. He earned a master's degree in computer science from State University of New York at Buffalo and in the 1990s worked for more than two years at search engine Infoseek before returning to China to found Baidu. He quickly learned to play by China's rules and has won support from the government--in contrast to Google, which resisted following Beijing censorhsip rules.
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