Baidu Releases Q2 Report with Strong Growth in All Businesses

Baidu released on August 1 its unaudited financial report for the second quarter of the 2018 fiscal year. Baidu‘s total revenue grew 32 percent to reach 26 billion yuan ($60 billion), while its net profit grew 45 percent to reach 6.4 billion yuan.

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Mobile revenue continues to dominate Baidu‘s revenue streams at 77 percent. After the market closed yesterday, Baidu‘s share price rose more than 4 percent at one point.

Baidu‘s search business revenue is growing significantly with the high liquidity in the AI-driven business, as well as the good momentum of the information flow business and commercial growth, said Robin Li, Baidu chairman and CEO.

In terms of revenue composition, Baidu‘s online advertising revenue in the second quarter was 21.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25 percent. Baidu said the platform currently has about 510,000 active customers, a 9 percent increase from last year. The average contribution per customer was approximately 41,000 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

Revenue from iQiyi, Baidu’s video platform, increased 51 percent from Q2 2017 to 6.2 billion yuan, mainly due to the strong growth of iQIYI memberships and other businesses.

From a business point of view, Baidu Mobile, DuerOS and the Apollo autonomous driving platform all performed relatively well. As of June 2018, Baidu Mobile has drawn 148 million daily active users, an increase of 17 percent from the same period last year. In June alone, DuerOS has been activated on 90 million intelligent devices, an increase of 80 percent compared with the beginning of the year, and its voice wake-up function has been used more than 400 million times, twofold the figure from three months ago.

As for Apollo, Baidu and Chinese bus manufacturer King Long cooperated in the mass production of the world’s first Level 4 self-driving bus Apolong in the second quarter. On July 4, 2018, the number of cars coming off of production lines reached 100. At the same time, the unmanned vehicles jointly built by Apollo and its partners have also been put in the assemble line.

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Baidu was ranked third in a list of 100 top Internet companies jointly released by China’s Ministry of Industry and Informational Technology and the Internet Society of China, just behind its long-standing rivals the Alibaba Group and Tencent.

Feature Image Source:  Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg/Getty