Baidu creates own indices to track state of China’s economy

BEIJING: Baidu Inc released its first indexes tracking the state of China’s economy and consumers, indicating a rise in unemployment and predicting a drop in sales for Apple Inc.

Based on mapping query data from China’s biggest search engine, the indicators employ the positions of users, the 25 billion location requests they seek and the WiFi hotspots they log into across the country.

Baidu handles 70 to 80 per cent of all online searches in China and its mapping service boasts 700 million active users.

From this month, the company will release employment and consumer indexes, both of which have showed a decline when compared with 2014.

Wu Haishan, a senior data scientist, said Baidu would start selling more granular data next month, which was capable of tracking the performance of specific cities, industries and even brands like Apple.

The indicators will be released at the start of each month.

“Such analysis should be very useful for the likes of hedge funds, investors or managers at companies.”

“It will be charged based on volume of the data that you are interested in, for example how many cities, how many provinces or how many firms you are interested in.”

Investors and analysts have long questioned the methodology of Chinese government-issued statistics, one reason why some economywatchers turn to indexes compiled by private sources such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and payments network UnionPay. Bloomberg