Always do your due diligence, etc etc
Ctrip owns Skyscanner.
Baidu to sell $1bn of shares in travel website Ctrip
Sale of one-third stake intended to boost cash reserves at Chinese search engine group
China’s search engine giant Baidu is selling roughly $1bn of its shares in Ctrip, China’s largest travel-booking website, bolstering its cash on hand after a difficult year for profits.
Ctrip, which owns UK flight search engine Skyscanner and is known as Trip.com outside of China, announced on Wednesday in a stock exchange filing that it will sell 31.3m of its Nasdaq-listed shares that are currently owned by Baidu. The sale makes up a third of Baidu’s stake in Ctrip, and Baidu will remain its largest shareholder after the sale.
Baidu has struggled to maintain its position in the “tech trinity” of China’s most-valuable tech companies alongside Alibaba and Tencent, who were faster to adapt to the mobile age. Its profits have suffered in recent years as a result of scandals over medical advertising and falling advertising revenues.
Baidu, whose primary app offering is its search engine and news feed, is facing harsh competition in advertising revenues from apps that offer transactions and social media data for better targeted advertising, such as Tencent’s WeChat social messaging app and Meituan Dianping’s takeaway app.
In May, the company reported its first quarterly loss since listing in New York in 2005. Cost-cutting helped the company return to profit in August, but its net profits were still down 63 per cent on the previous year.
Source - Baidu to sell $1bn of shares in travel website Ctrip