Baidu’s revenue in the first quarter increased by 10% year-on-year, exceeding expectations |

Chinese search engine giant Baidu’s first-quarter revenue rose 10 percent year-on-year, beating expectations.

Based on reports from China Business News and Reuters, Baidu announced its unaudited financial report for the first quarter ended March 31 on Tuesday afternoon (May 16).

In the first quarter, Baidu achieved revenue of 31.1 billion yuan (RMB, the same below, about S$5.963 billion), a year-on-year increase of 10%, and net profit attributable to Baidu was 5.8 billion yuan; The profit reached 5.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 48%. This is the first time that Baidu Smart Cloud has achieved non-GAAP profitability this quarter.

Analysts quoted by Reuters estimated that Baidu’s first-quarter revenue would be 29.97 billion yuan.

Baidu’s core online marketing revenue in the first quarter was 16.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%; core operating profit increased by a substantial 45% year-on-year to 5.36 billion yuan. The core performance growth has promoted the profit growth of Baidu Group.

According to the report, the increase in profitability, on the one hand, has benefited from the rapid recovery of the Chinese economy, which has led to a substantial increase in marketing budgets in industries such as tourism, business services and local services; on the other hand, Baidu has continued to implement comprehensive cost reduction and efficiency enhancement measures in the past year. .

Baidu CEO Robin Li said on Tuesday that growth in the first quarter was mainly driven by offline verticals, especially benefiting the company’s advertisers in offline industries such as travel and healthcare. He believes that as the economy recovers after the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers will spend more on performance-based advertising platforms, and Baidu-related businesses are bound to benefit from this trend.

In the first quarter of this year, Baidu’s stock price experienced ups and downs due to the launch of an online chat robot similar to ChatGPT “Wen Xin Yi Yan”. The stock price rose sharply during the rumor stage, but it also fell by more than 10% on the day of the product release. Rebounded in two days. Baidu is currently testing Wenxinyiyan across all of its businesses, using its capabilities to reshape the company’s products and services for businesses and consumers.

Robin Li said Baidu plans to steadily integrate Wenxinyiyan into all of Baidu’s businesses, although he did not disclose a timetable. Li Yanhong believes that the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and large-scale language models has demonstrated the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in all walks of life. Baidu CFO Luo Rong also said that in the next few quarters, Baidu will continue to invest unswervingly in the field of generative artificial intelligence.

Robin Li later said in a call with analysts that Baidu had applied to the government for approval of Wenxinyiyan, and once it received regulatory approval, it would roll it out on a large scale.