According to a new report from Canalys, Baidu has managed to push Google into the smart speaker market.
Baidu reportedly shipped 4.5 million devices in the second quarter of 2019, a notable improvement compared to Google's 4.3 million. However, one very important point should be noted here - the products of the Chinese company are currently available exclusively in China.
In the second quarter of 2018, Google owned 32.3% of the market. Second place then belonged to Amazon - 24.5%. As for Baidu, its share at that time was quite insignificant and amounted to 0.7%. But it took only a year for the situation on the market to change dramatically. Amazon broke into first place, although in percentage terms, its share remained almost unchanged. Google share fell by 19.8% and is now 16.7%. On the other hand, Baidu showed fantastic growth in 3700%, capturing 17.3% of the market.
Analysts believe that the reason for this growth was the rapid development of the smart speaker market in China. Baidu skillfully took advantage of this by launching an aggressive advertising campaign. By the way, the 4th and 5th places also belong to Chinese companies - Alibaba (15.8%) and Xiaomi (10.8%). Compared to the second quarter of 2018, they also showed significant growth, even if not as noticeable as in the case of Baidu.
Concurrently, the U.S. smart speaker market is reported to have contracted 2.4% in the second quarter of 2019. The reason for this may be a decline in interest among consumers, who have not yet appreciated the benefits of the new technology. Just voice commands are clearly not enough for buyers to believe that they need to make such a purchase.