Photo/Liu Chunshan (NBD)

May 14 (NBD) -- Chinese tech company Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) is beefing up investment in the highly competitive live streaming sector to boost its growth in the mobile end.

At the company's annual mobile ecosystem conference on Wednesday, vice president Ping Xiaoli said Baidu will spend 500 million yuan (70.4 million U.S. dollars) in subsidy, plus exposure support, to discover and foster 1,000 live streaming stars.

The company's boss is giving personal support to the new strategy. On Thursday, Baidu said its founder and CEO Robin Li will go on live streaming for the first time on Friday night, when he will have a dialogue with founder of online reading platform Fandengread.com on books.

The theme of Robin's first streaming corresponds with Baidu's differentiated strategic focus. According to executive vice president Shen Dou, Baidu's streaming service will emphasize on providing information and knowledge, instead of gaming and e-commerce display which are more commonly seen on China's live streaming platforms.

In the eyes of industry insiders, the more niche focus suits the relative strength of Baidu, China's biggest provider of search engine service, as the live streaming sector has been dominated by short video giants like Tencent-backed Kuaishou and ByteDance's Douyin, which has developed streaming businesses for years and has accumulated plenty of influential content creators.

According to market researcher QuestMobile, as of March, 2020, the daily active users (DAU) of Douyin and Kuaishou reached 296 million and 214 million, respectively. In comparison, Baidu said Wednesday that DAUs of its main short video app Haokan Video was over 30 million, which marks a lukewarm growth from about 22 million in Q1 2019.

As Baidu faces stiff competition from established players Douyin and Kuaishou, the effectiveness of the incentive plan remains to be seen.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn