After Alibaba, China’s Baidu and Fosun are showing interest in Indian start ups

Indian start ups have been able to gather immense steam and have made a strong foothold in the global market. After Alibaba, now China’s search engine Baidu and one of the country's biggest private conglomerates Fosun are scouting to invest in Indian startups. While this is still in discussion stage, the final call would be taken shortly.

While Alibaba had invested in internet-driven start ups, Baidu and Fosun are considering other start ups as well, which are not so dependent on the web. For information, consumer Internet group Alibaba has bought stakes in Paytm and Snapdeal this year while Tencent of WeChat fame have invested in healthcare portal Practo last month.

Baidu is China's most popular search engine and the world's fourthmost popular site after Google, Facebook and Youtube. The company is listed on Nasdaq and has a market capitalisation of $52 billion (Rs 3.4 lakh crore). Fosun group, which has interest in steel, financial services and real estate, is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and has a market value of nearly $13 billion. Representatives for Baidu and Fosun did not reply to email queries sent on Thursday.

China’s drastic slip in economy recently has landed Chinese companies in a whirlpool of doubts and fear. To counter the unfavourable conditions at home, some of the companies are considering investing on India, which has a speedy potential of growth in next few years.
"India is the next big wave," Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of venture capital firm Walden International said in an interview last month. "With large companies like Foxconn coming in and Flextronics with a presence here already, we can start to really scale. It is going to be huge."
Also Read: Why Facebook is investing so much money in Indian startups