I’ve been follow-up a news that surrounding Baidu, the China search giant and Maxthon, a popular Chinese browser for a couple of days. A buzz from the China Internet industry stated that Baidu has acquired Maxthon for an undisclosed sum. There is certainly no confirmation about this news, and yet no official announcement can be found on Baidu or Maxthon’s site. Frankly, I putting this rumor at mostly 50% to be true. In last year April, the first Internet company that has vast interest on Maxthon was Google (read my April 2007 post). Though buying a browser and make it an asset, so whenever an user in China used this particular browser, the first landing search engine will be Google or Baidu, for Google or Baidu, this is indeed not a necessary move for them.

Apparently, Maxthon browser has great appeal for Baidu or Google, because it is made-in China. While buying Maxthon raises a question of ROI (Return on Investment), but this news offers tips that Baidu has quietly expanded its product lines. Nevertheless, no news is not a good news for Baidu. Perhaps reading a newest article posted by China Web 2.0 Review will tell you more about the secrets of Baidu’s investment.

For the IE-based Maxthon browser, it reached a historical milestone by reaching more than 100 million downloads. At the time of my writing, it showed 100,650,698 download on the landing page. Just a couple of days ago, Maxthon browser has a newer version, i.e. 2.0 with a lot of bugs fixed by their engineer team.

There’s so much news pertaining to Google that bought a stake in a popular Chinese browser, Maxthon Browser yesterday. Famous news provider CNet has a post on this topic, but it seems that it’s not true as the founder of Maxthon has told the Sina Technology News Online (in Mandarin). He said it’s a rumor yet cannot rule out the possibility for cooperation in business in the future. However he declined to discuss further details on this issue.