Sogou will be listed in the United States today. What will be its future status on the domestic Internet?
Sogou has been successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, closing with a market value of approximately US$5.3 billion. Market value is an intuitive reflection of the status of an Internet company. According to market value, Sohu's status among Chinese Internet companies is not good.
At present, among China’s listed Internet companies, Tencent and Alibaba are far ahead with a market value of close to 450 billion, followed by Baidu, which is third, with a market value of more than 80 billion, JD.com with a market value of more than 55 billion, NetEase with a market value of 40 billion, and WeChat. Bo 20 billion, 58 Gouji 10 billion, and Sogou, which has always been known as the "Millennium Second" in the search field, is only half of the 58 Gouji, slightly higher than Vipshop. Based on this market value, it has lost the position with the big brother in search Baidu has a chance to challenge. What's more, according to the latest third-party statistics, Sogou's market share on the PC side lags significantly behind 360 Search, and on the mobile side it lags behind Alibaba's Shenma Search. I even doubt that Sogou's search request volume It will lag far behind Souyisou on WeChat. With such data, it is reasonable to get such a market value.
I am even worried that Sogou’s market value today is already Sogou’s peak moment.
Sogou’s market share mainly relies on traffic diversion from Tencent and Sohu. It relies on its own Sogou search app and Sogou series app matrix to get very little traffic. As the largest shareholder, Tencent has already listed Sogou. Will you abandon Sogou in the future and support your own products? This year, WeChat has established a search application division. This is the biggest move in the organizational structure of the WeChat business group this year. If WeChat gives up its support for Sogou and no longer exclusively opens the traffic of official accounts to search, it will instead By doing it within the app and promoting its own "Souyisou" function, Sogou's meager market share will probably be squeezed even more miserably, right? This is an important factor related to the stability of Sogou's market value.
As the second largest shareholder, Sohu’s own traffic has already reached its ceiling. As more and more PC users give up the habit of reading news on the portal, the Sohu portal can direct traffic to Sogou. It is also becoming more and more limited. In addition, in the past two years, the performance of Sohu News client on the mobile terminal is far worse than that of Tencent and NetEase, and there are such personalized pressures as Toutiao and Tiantian Kuaibao. If nothing else, it should not be It will turn around, so the traffic Sohu can provide to Sogou on the mobile terminal should be less and less. Therefore, if Sogou does not think of a better way, I am afraid that its market share will continue to shrink.
As for the artificial intelligence that Sogou is currently deploying, I think it’s okay not to mention it. Now Chinese Internet companies and BAT are also deploying it. These three companies are far stronger in terms of capital reserves and data accumulation. Sogou, so if these three companies engage in artificial intelligence, they will definitely outperform Sogou by several blocks. Tell me, how do you play Sogou?