Sales 2023: RMB 134.598 billion (€ 17.570 billion)

Overview

Baidu is another of China's major online and media companies, ranked sixth among the world's most visited websites, behind Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter) (source: "similarweb", as of March 2024). Similar to its Western counterpart Google, Baidu has organized a range of map, cloud and social networking services around its main product, the search engine of the same name.

General Information

Headquarters
Baidu Campus
No. 10 Shangdi 10th Street
Haidian District
Beijing 100085
China
Telephone: 0086 10 5992 8888
website: ir.baidu.com

Branches of trade: Search services, social media, cloud computing, software
Legal form: Stock Company
Financial year: 01.01. – 31.12.
Founding year: 2000

Basic economic data (in million RMB)

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue	134.598	123.675	124.493	107.074	107.413	102.277
Profit	20.315	7.559	10.226	22.472	2.057	27.573
share price (in US$, year-end)	118,15	114,38	148,79	216,24	133,80	160,95
Employees	39.800	41.300	45.500	41.000	37.779	40.127

Executives and Directors

Management:

• Robin Li, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO
• Rong Luo, Chief Financial Officer
• Haifeng Wang, Chief Technology Officer
• Dou Shen, Executive Vice President
• Herman Yu, Chief Strategy Officer
• Victor Liang, senior vice president
• Shansan Cui, senior vice president
  

Board of Directors:

• Robin Li, Baidu
• James Ding, independent director
• Yuanqing Yang, independent director
• Brent Callinicos, Independent Director
• Jixun Foo, independent director

History

In 1989, Eric Xu, then a sales representative for a biotech company, decided to make a documentary about innovation in Silicon Valley. Together with two business friends, the couple Melissa and Robin Li, Xu also interviewed Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. Robin Li in particular was impressed by how a fellow Chinese like Yang had managed to form what was then the largest online company in the USA.

Li, who had always been fascinated by search engines, had already developed an algorithm years earlier that, like Google's PageRank, hierarchized search results based on links. In January 2000, Xu and Li founded the company Baidu (roughly: one hundred times) together with the venture capitalist Finian Tan from Singapore, who, as a founding partner, secured start-up Baidu with seed funding of 7.5 million dollars. After that, things went uphill. In 2001, Baidu launched an ad-financed search engine and, ironically, received a five million dollar injection from Google. Apparently, there were plans to buy the company outright later. Microsoft and Yahoo then also wanted to take over Baidu. When it went public in August 2005, the share price of "China's Google" increased fivefold and Li became China's first Internet billionaire.

A huge advantage for Baidu was of course that the competition from the US internet giants, especially Google, was never able to gain a foothold in China. It all started in 2009 when the Chinese government blocked Twitter in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Shortly afterwards, access to YouTube and Facebook was also blocked - after unrest in the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. Google has been unavailable since 2014, only in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. What seems to work in China is the restricted Microsoft search engine. BingUnlike Google, Microsoft adheres to the Chinese government's censorship guidelines.

In any case, Baidu was able to achieve a quasi-monopoly position for internet searches in China within just a few years. Nevertheless, criticism is also being raised in China. The state television channel CCTV published research into Baidu's business practices and relationships with various sectors of the industry. Individual party officials have openly considered developing what is essentially a state-run search engine with the help of state newspapers or the Xinhua news agency. And with the rise of Tencent and Alibaba, strong competition has developed between online companies. Tencent in particular has overtaken Baidu with its messaging tools and online games. In order to continue to grow and satisfy shareholders, Baidu began expanding its core business to include e-commerce and gaming services in 2015 by acquiring and investing in start-ups.

In May 2018, Robin Li addressed the staff in an open letter. He admitted that Baidu was in a "gloomy situation". Nevertheless, further investments were needed for future growth. Li was in an unfamiliar position. For the first time since 2005, he was faced with a loss in the first quarter of 2018. This was due to high spending on program content for iQiyi and in new businesses Big Data and artificial intelligence such as the DuerOS voice assistant or the Apollo platform. Expenses for next gen technologies that is, which were still far from being ready for the market.

management

Baidu founder and CEO Robin Li (born 1968), married, four children, is probably the only media company boss with his own fan club. Young Chinese students in particular admire the computer scientist, who was educated in Beijing and New York and is the son of factory workers, because of his success and his looks. He began his career as a simple engineer at Infoseek and, with a fortune of around ten billion dollars, is ranked 35th among the richest Chinese people in Forbes.

Critics accuse Li of manipulating Baidu search results by giving sites from direct competitors such as Tencent or Alibaba a disadvantage in the search results. There have also been rumors that Baidu is too close to its most important advertising customers. For example, information about the milk producer Sanlu Group, which sold poisoned milk in 2008, was allegedly removed from Baidu searches. Li has repeatedly admitted to censoring search results according to the wishes of the Chinese government. He counters critics by saying that he is only adhering to the applicable laws. Bloomberg News quotes him as saying: "I am an entrepreneur, not a politician."

Business Units

Baidu essentially consists of two business areas: the search engine segment and the video platform iQiyi.

The Baidu.com app is the fifth most visited website in the world, has about 174 million daily users and offers, in addition to the flagship app The Baidu search engine includes the following services: Baidu PostBar (social mediaplatform), Haokan and Quanmin (short videos), Baidu Wiki, Baidu Knows, Baidu Experience, Baidu Post, Baidu Maps and many more.

iQiyi (formerly Qiyi) is China's largest video portal with six billion hours spent on iQiyi per month and 500 million active users per month. To make the paid iQiyi version ("Netflix-like video streamer") more popular, Baidu and its subsidiary iQiyi Motion Pictures produce their own films. Since mid-2018, it has even been possible to rent selected real cinemas to watch iQiyi films there. At the end of 2020, iQiyi had 101.7 million paying subscribers (in March 2018, there were still 61.3 million).

Current developments

Despite the loss in 2018, Li was not deterred. On July 4, 2019, it was reported: "Google rival Baidu joins forces with Toyota and Geely." Google was researching self-driving cars with its Waymo subsidiary. Baidu did things differently. Here it was the world's largest car manufacturer Toyota and the smaller Chinese Geely that joined Baidu's Apollo platform. China in particular, it was reported, is investing in automation in order to keep up with Tesla and Waymo, and is already setting rules for self-driving vehicles. Baidu already had permission to use autonomous cars on some inner-city streets. German partners also got on board. "VW has a new partner for robot cars," wrote the FAZ on November 2, 2018. VW is "not doing things by halves" and has entered into a partnership with the Baidu platform Apollo: "Apollo is considered the leading technology consortium for autonomous driving in the People's Republic, where the development of robot cars is progressing rapidly."

The time has come in 2021. "Baidu Apollo is launching a fully driverless ride-hailing service in Beijing, demonstrating a new marketing model for autonomous driving," Baidu announced on April 29, 2021. The "Apollo Go Robotaxi Service" will initially be introduced in Beijing's Shougang Park, one of the venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Without a safety driver at the wheel, robotaxis can transport users to sports halls, workplaces, cafes and hotels. And during the Olympics, they will be available as a shuttle service for athletes and employees.