Founder puts research at heart of his company

The techie founded Baidu in Zhongguancun, China's high-tech business hub, with his search engine patent granted in the United States in 1997.

"I'm willing to pour money into research; I don't care about Wall Street's opinion or a drop in share prices－I'm bound to make it," news portal Southern.com quoted him saying.

An IT patent report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at an intellectual property forum in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in April shows that some 2.48 million IT patent applications were filed in China in the first half of last year, an 18.7 percent rise year-on-year.

Chinese dotcoms reported "explosive growth" in instant messaging, online payment and games, social media, cloud computing or big data, research engines, and Internet security in 2014, according to analysis of domestic Internet technological innovation jointly released by Peking University and the China Law Association on Science and Technology.

Baidu filed more than 1,000 patent applications last year, said Zhi Binwei, an official at the Zhongguancun administrative committee.

Zhou Qi, the company's senior IP adviser, told the media, "Our company is not the largest filer, but as a dotcom with a technology gene, it is rich in investment and output in such core technological fields as AI, which indicates that it has reached the dizzy heights of technology value."