In May 2019, five Baidu executives left the company, four of whom are members of the management team of Baidu Search. According to Tencent News, two of those four executives have joined ByteDance, namely Wu Haifeng and Sun Wenyu.
After leaving Baidu, Wu Haifeng and Sun Wenyu co-founded a company to do medical information-related business. But no news came out of the startup.
When they left Baidu, they had a one-year employment suspension agreement with the company. Now the lockout period is completely over. According to Tencent News, the entirety of their company was merged into ByteDance - which indicates that ByteDance employs two key Baidu search executives and teams.
The report also says that after their departure from Baidu many members of Wu Haifeng's team also left. Some of them, including Baidu's chief search architect Tan Zeng, joined him at ByteDance.
According to Tencent News, both Wu Haifeng and Sun Wenyu were excellent employees who grew up in the Baidu system, including Wu Haifeng, who was a vice president at Baidu for 13 years, and Sun Wenyu, who was an executive director at Baidu for 12 years.
Their unexpected resignations are related to an internal reassignment. In February 2019, Baidu Search launched a round of rotations with the main purpose of fighting against ByteDance. On the user product side, Wu Haifeng and Shen Dou are two veterans of Baidu Search, with Shen Dou in charge of Baidu Mobile and Feed and Wu Haifeng in charge of search.
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In the early 2019 rotation, the company decided to let Shen Dou take charge of information flow and search alone in order to improve internal efficiency against ByteDance.
"Wu Haifeng did not agree to the rotation, but the company has made an announcement." A source close to Baidu said. Sun Wenyu was promoted by Wu Haifeng to executive director, responsible for core search. Wu Haifeng was transferred, then Sun Wenyu resigned and then Wu Haifeng followed.
Baidu search has been restructured into a mobile ecology business group (MEG) after a number of senior executives left the company, with Shen Dou was promoted to senior vice president. And Wu Haifeng chose to lead a group of veterans to join the direct competitors one year later.
A source close to Baidu told Tencent News, in ByteDance, Wu Haifeng may be responsible for the health care industry, including medical information and Internet health care.
Baidu faces competition from ByteDance in several major sources of advertising revenue - healthcare, education, gaming and finance - except for medical care. "Medical care is the last piece". According to Baidu senior sources, medical advertising is a relatively important source of Baidu's advertising revenue.
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