Google in China

Introduction/Background

Google Inc., founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin is a well-known household name that has overtime become the main search engine used by many consumers internationally. As stated on Google.com “The Company’s mission is to re-organize the world’s information and it make universally accessible and useful.” Google has done so by offering a translated version in many countries as well as offering a local version of Google in several countries as well. In Google’s attempt to capture the global market the company made the decision to enter China with a local version of Google.com which was Google.cn. Although Google’s reasons for entering the Chinese market were countless such as the rapid growth of internet population and promising search market Google faced a major hurdle in making it accessible and useful to the people in China.

SWOT

Strength

Google has since its introduction to consumers has quickly become a household name. This has been a major strength for Google, on average the website receives 34,000 searches per second making that close to 2 billion website searches per day. An internet marketing firm reports that 97% of consumers use Google as their main method of searching for information. This has created strong brand equity for the company which is also another great strength. Research has shown that consumers prefer to use Google’s search engine because it shows information that is more pertinent to the search. Another major strength for Google is that it is constantly growing by the consistent revenue that it collects from their advertising business. Google as a search engine has been engrained into the minds of many, when you usually need an answer the first thing you can count on someone saying is “Google it” These strengths for the company as a whole was used to capture the rapid growth of the internet population in China according to the case study the internet population in China reached 384 million in 2009 from 45.8 million in 2002. Google’s strength was its strong brand equity could make it a top search engine in China as well. With the technology and ability to widen the search engines to accommodate people of China, google.cn could capitalize on the fast growing market. Google also had a major strength through the partnership with China Mobile in launching the smart phone based on Googles Android operating system.

Weakness

In the United States Google is the number one search engine but because the company wants to grow Google’s main weakness are the privacy barriers with other countries. As Read Write Web states, leaders from ten countries wrote Google criticizing the privacy of new applications (Melanson, 2010). The United States Google search engine is not as stringent to the amount of information