On Febr.4, Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), Sogou’s parent company announced that due to the growing strength of Sogou, Wang XiaoChuan (Sogou CEO and Sohu CTO) would no longer serve as CTO of Sohu anymore.
One insider revealed that Sogou would make big strides on capital end after Chinese New Year, some assumed an IPO planning.
According to Sohu’s financial report, in Q4 of last year, Sogou generated 41 million US dollar in revenue, indicating an increase of 78% yoy and a rise of 10% qoq. As for annual turnover, Sogou generated 131 million US dollar, showing a rise of 108% yoy. The parent company Sohu harvested 1.067 billion US dollar, crossing the 1 billiom mark and up 25% yoy.
Sogou revenue breakdown: 5% was from game, 21% portal site and 74% search engine. By Dec. 2012, Sogou’s user pool has exceeded 400 million, with 188 million daily active users and 285 million weekly active users, only lagging behind Tencent and Qihoo360.
With regard to future, Mr. Wang himself looked forward to mobile search and service like voice assistant. He expected the voice search engine would be the core product in the future combining input method. Wang also predicted the war among Sogou, Baidu and Qihoo360 would continue to this year, even more ferocious. Sogou launched its own voice assistant last year.
Sogou is a hot IPO candidate for this year thought Mr. Wang himself insisted that there’s no exact timetable for that.
sogou launched Siri-like voice assistant
Image credit: Sogou