Fortune set out to pick the Businessperson of the Year — and
Fortune set out to pick the Businessperson of the Year — and the 49 runners-up. They searched for leaders who didn’t just crawl from the wreckage of the Great Recession, but sprinted from it. Some Asians made the list!
Number 6. Robin Li , Bidu (BIDU)
Google’s loss was Baidu’s gain — especially when that loss was China’s 420 million web users. In March, Google stopped censoring its search results in China and redirected Chinese searchers to its Hong Kong site. The company’s market share began tanking — and there to take up the slack was Robin Li’s Baidu. Baidu, which already led the Chinese market, is now a juggernaut. Its end-of-2009 market share of 58% is now up to an amazing 73%. With some 8.5 billion search requests a month, it’s poised to overtake Yahoo as the world’s second-largest search outfit.
Other Asians who made the list:
21. Wang Chuanfu, BYD (BYD)
39. Geesung Choi, Samsung Electronics
50. Li Li, Shenzhen Hepalink Pharmaceutical