Market Potential For Baidu’s Popular PC Faster Software
Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) made news this week by announcing that its PC Faster software completed over 70 million downloads worldwide. PC Faster is a software that tunes personal computers (PC) to enhance performance features. These features include boot up time and responsiveness of programs such as games and office suites. Although currently distributed free of cost, its popularity could make PC Faster a potential revenue source for Baidu. In this article we take a look at PC Faster and some of its competitors to get a sense of the market potential for Baidu in this segment. [1]
See our complete analysis of Baidu here
According to a Baidu spokesperson, PC Faster makes old computers as fast as new with the click of a button. It speeds up computers by removing three sources of slow computing. It removes left over files from uninstalled software and junk files in recycle bin to deliver a junk-free PC. It frees up memory that is tied up in background processes where they are not needed. It also removes unnecessary boot-up items, i.e., software that starts up along with the operating system at the switching on of the PC. [2]
The current version of PC Faster can reduce boot up time for computers by four or more seconds, compared to the previous version. It also has a facility to make the computer into a wi-fi hotspot so that tablets and mobile phones can use the internet access available in the computer. For gamers, PC faster makes games run faster, by managing the computing resources available to the games vis-à-vis the other processes running simultaneously in the background. [1]
Analysis Of Competitors And Market Potential
There are several companies that offer products that compete with PC Faster. Some of them are sold by established anti-virus companies. These include Tune Up Utilities by AVG and PC Optimizer by Bit Defender. [3] Both of these are sold at a premium over their lesser known competitors. Among the latter category are PC Optimizers by Lavasoft and TechGenie. [4] The table below gives the price for each of these products.
PC Faster Competitors
Although PC Faster is currently distributed free of cost, its increasing popularity may lead Baidu to consider its revenue generation potential. For instance, let us assume a price of $30 per customer leads 10% of the 70 million free users to become premium users. These assumptions are likely to be on the conservative side given the competitor prices. The revenue potential under this scenario is $210 million. A brief scenario analysis giving potential market sizes in millions of dollars is given in the table below.
Market Potential For Baidu PC Faster ($ Million)
Although Baidu claims PC faster will be free forever, we feel the immense market potential could lead it to turn this software into a revenue stream. It could do so by offering the more attractive features in a premium format. Going ahead, this may lead to the addition of a new revenue driver to to our model of Baidu.
View Interactive Institutional Research (Powered by Trefis):
Global Large Cap | U.S. Mid & Small Cap | European Large & Mid Cap | More Trefis Research