Zhang Chaoyang's Sogou Ma Huateng's Sogou

Sogou, which had originally planned to go public in the United States in the first half of the year, has postponed its plan to the second half of the year. According to foreign media, its valuation exceeds US$3 billion.

Wang Xiaochuan, who is used to seeing various bigwigs ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, still chooses US stocks more than 90% of the time.

Although the domestic A-share market is now very crazy, in traditional cognition, America is the world's financial, technological, and cultural center;

Although 360, Xunlei and Shenma are now undergoing privatization, the exit of second-tier Chinese stocks further highlights the value of high-quality Chinese stocks.

From the earliest "giant seedling" in the traditional Internet to another "BAT collateral concept stock" after Cheetah, 58.com and Youku, Sogou is like a mirror, reflecting the various mentalities of the players behind it, which are really different.

Zhang Chaoyang’s Sogou.

I recently met an old friend from Sohu and talked about Tencent's investment in Sogou. We all agreed that Boss Zhang's choice was a sign of Sohu's withdrawal from the center stage of the Internet.

In fact, when 360, Baidu and Tencent were bidding for Sogou, Tencent was the least favored one.

It is said, just said, that the bids from the first two companies were as follows:

360's bid is a stock swap. After the stock swap, Zhang Chaoyang's Sohu will become 360's largest shareholder. At the same time, 360's traffic will be more thoroughly injected into Sohu Video.

If so, the 360-Sohu small giant structure will be born.

Baidu 's bid is to directly exchange iQiyi for Sogou's shares. iQiyi, the second largest in the industry, will merge with Sohu Video, and Baidu's traffic will be directed to Sohu Video.

If this happens, a giant in the video industry will be born.

Everyone knows what happened later. Boss Zhang chose the worst solution for Sogou and Sohu:

Tencent Soso merged into Sogou, and Tencent's browser and other products injected traffic into Sogou. At the same time, Tencent injected more than 400 million US dollars into Sogou.

However, due to offending Baidu and 360 at the same time and failing to swallow up Tencent Video or portal business, Sohu Video's business development fell into trouble.

It can be said that Sogou’s rapid growth in the past two years was achieved at the expense of Sohu Video.

How can I put it, Zhang Chaoyang is such a good person.

Ma Huateng's Sogou

At least until now, Sogou is still merged into Sohu's financial report. Sohu and Zhang Chaoyang hold 39.6%+9.2% of the shares, which is almost 49%. This is a very sensitive number.

Wang Xiaochuan had a famous saying at the time (the content of which was later urgently publicized), which roughly meant: The shareholding ratios of Sohu and Tencent are not particularly different, so whoever our management team favors will have control.

At least from my observation, Wang Xiaochuan and his classmates from Sogou rarely mention Sohu. I only hear them talking about Tencent all the time. "New Sogou" is what they call themselves.

In addition, according to the agreement, Tencent will have the right to increase its stake to 40% after Sogou goes public. As Sogou's shares are diluted and Tencent increases its stake, it is probably only a matter of time before Sogou's dominance changes hands.

Zhang Xiaolong's Sogou

Sogou has three major businesses, which is the three-stage rocket that Wang Xiaochuan has been talking about for a long time, including: input method, browser and search.

The part with the greatest commercial value and the one that attracts the most attention from investors is undoubtedly search. Therefore, after Tencent acquired a stake in Sogou, it mainly focused on Sogou search. This includes two parts:

First, the part that is rarely promoted but has real value is the traffic diversion from Tencent Browser to Sogou Search, which is the key to Sogou's profitability.

Second, there is the part that has been heavily promoted but has little substantive effect: Sogou’s WeChat search.

Sogou can crawl WeChat content, which is great, but apart from PR companies, few ordinary users use this function. However, Sogou search + WeChat is still the part with the most room for imagination.

In Wang Xiaochuan’s three-stage rocket theory, the browser is the entrance and traffic source for the search business. So, what if the browser is replaced by WeChat?

WeChat has operated more than 10 million public accounts in two years, and WeChat e-commerce and WeChat O2O have become active in the WeChat ecosystem. The scale of the entire WeChat ecosystem is almost equal to half of China's mobile Internet.

In such a huge ecosystem, the integration of search engines is natural and reasonable, and its commercial value has been fully verified by Baidu and Google.

Sogou continues to promote its WeChat search because it actually sees this point in mind.

But what’s interesting is that Sogou has held many WeChat search launch conferences, and Tencent President Martin Lau has personally attended the event, but no one from Guangyan has ever been seen.

What’s even more interesting is that WeChat launched a search function in August last year, which was independently developed. It was independently developed - well, because it is very important, I have to say it twice.

Currently, WeChat’s search function is evolving rapidly, including public accounts, chat records, Moments, and even external web pages.

With the rapid evolution of WeChat search and the huge user traffic of WeChat, it is only a matter of time before the WeChat search box becomes the largest mobile search portal.

Then, things get interesting. When WeChat is connected to search, will it be Wang Xiaochuan's Sogou search or Zhang Xiaolong's WeChat search? Or a mixture of both?

I believe that Wang Xiaochuan and Zhang Xiaolong, the two legendary god-level technicians, would like to know, or they may have already known it.

However, are those micro-business people who are always talking about it ready to learn search engine optimization?