According to those who are aware of the situation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Samsung Electronics will not be swapping the default search engine on its mobile devices from Google to Microsoft’s Bing any time soon.
In premarket trading, shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, increased by more than 1%. Shares of Microsoft were down nearly 1%.
According to the story, Samsung stopped an internal evaluation that looked at swapping Google’s web browser application for Bing, which is already pre-installed on the company’s phones.Requests for comment from Reuters were not immediately answered by Google, Samsung, or Microsoft.
The long-term ties that search engine companies have with smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Xiaomi account for a large portion of the revenue they generate.
The New York Times reported on April 16 that Google’s yearly revenue through the Samsung agreement is reportedly $3 billion (approximately Rs. 24,625 crore).
The initial news that Samsung was considering switching to Bing had a negative impact on Alphabet’s stock last month.
According to statistics from analytics company Similarweb, the addition of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology to Microsoft-owned Bing has increased traffic to the neglected search engine and improved its ability to compete with market leader Google in terms of page visit growth.
According to a source from last month, Google at the time responded to the threat with “panic” because the Samsung contract is expected to bring in an additional $3 billion (or around Rs. 24,625 crore) in income each year for Google.
The report also stated that Google was rushing to create a brand-new search engine powered by AI that would provide a more individualised experience than its present service, which is also set to have AI features.
