Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares closed up 1.71 per cent to HK$86.45 on Thursday.
Although overall revenue edged down, Baidu said in a statement on Thursday that its non-marketing operations grew 10 per cent year on year to 7.5 billion yuan in the second quarter, “mainly driven by AI Cloud business”.
“AI Cloud continued to accelerate in the second quarter, offsetting the ongoing macro headwinds for online marketing revenue,” Baidu co-founder, chairman and chief executive Robin Li Yanhong said in the statement.
“Throughout all layers of our AI technology stack and with the rapid adoption of applications built on top of Ernie, we are scaling AI to address real-world problems and generate substantial value both for external customers and our own product portfolio.”
Baidu chief financial officer Rong Luo, meanwhile, said the company expects “to maintain strong momentum” in its AI Cloud business, which includes the Ernie large language model (LLM) family and its applications. LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT and Baidu’s own Ernie Bot.
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Baidu wins permits to offer fully driverless robotaxi service in Beijing
Baidu wins permits to offer fully driverless robotaxi service in Beijing
Apollo Go, which now offers huge discounts to lure passengers, provided 899,000 rides in the June quarter, up 26 per cent from a year earlier. The cumulative rides surpassed 7 million as of July 28.
Baidu’s other business maintained steady growth, including the main search app that saw its monthly active users grow 4 per cent to 703 million in June. However, some other business segments did not meet expectations, especially video service iQiyi that reported a 5 per cent year-on-year revenue decrease to 7.4 billion yuan last quarter.
