Robin Li, the founder of the leading Chinese search engine Baidu, doubts if Google could still be a leading search engine in China had it not pulled out.
Speaking in an interview with China Central Television, Li said that Baidu's success is not necessarily dependent to Google's exit from the Chinese market.
In the interview, Li said, "This is a sort of misunderstanding. I've heard this a lot and I have to say I care because it isn't the truth."
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. abruptly halted most operations in mainland China in 2010 after cyberattacks against Gmail users and issues with the government over censorship of search results. A year prior to the exit, Baidu dominated the market with more than 60 percent share, while Google came second with approximately 33 percent of the market share.
Google has been working hard to return to the world's second largest economy in the recent past.
Referring to Google China woes, Li said, "The one who subverts me is myself, not some other company."
Besides likely future rivalry from its foreign counterparts, Baidu is focusing to take a hit from the 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) local battle to link Internet users to offline services like food delivery and movie ticketing, dragging the company's Q3 2015 profit down 27 percent amid an increase in revenue, according to China Technology News.
Li also unveiled that his worry was that Baidu's search engine, the current main business for the company, would someday become useless as the Chinese public comes to depend more on mobile apps as opposed to browser-based Web search.
A recently released report indicates that among China's Web users, 620 million people (about 90.1 percent) had mobile access to the Internet in 2015.
The clip aired on CCTV portrays the American-educated CEO onstage at the company's summer party, flashing a cheeky smile at times, speaking quickly to his colleagues in Chinese, and frequently tossing in an English word or two.