China’s largest search engine Baidu shipped 4.5 million smart speakers in the second quarter of 2019, up 3700% year-on-year, according to data released Monday by market research firm Canalys.
This allows Baidu to surpass Google, which shipped 4.3 million units, as the world’s second-largest vendor. Amazon, with a shipment of 6.6 million units, maintained the first position, with an annual growth of 61.1 %.
According to Canalys, Baidu’s extreme growth was largely thanks to its Xiaodu Smart Display, a smart speaker with a screen that sells for about USD 50 per unit, and accounted for 45% of Baidu’s smart speaker shipments.
Alibaba, which shipped 4.1 million units of its Tmall Genie smart speaker, came fourth globally, up 38.8% year-on-year, while the Chinese tech company Xiaomi occupied the fifth position, with 2.8 million unit shipments, 37.5% more than in the same period of 2018.
Baidu previously dethroned Alibaba’s smart speakers’ sales in the first quarter of 2019, shipping 3.3 million speakers compared to Alibabas’s 3.2 million units.
The Chinese smart speaker market continues his growth momentum, reaching 12.5 million units quarterly shipment, more than double the US market, with 6.1 million units.