Advertising has historically driven commerce and served as the main income source for many internet corporations that don’t charge users directly for their services. However, a weak national economy has eroded advertising revenue, causing Baidu’s revenue to rise just 1% to $4.4 billion last quarter, according to a fresh report from the Chinese company.
This marks the lowest revenue growth in more than a year, but Baidu’s actual revenue still exceeded investors’ expectations. Net income was noticeably higher than analysts’ expectations, at $748 million compared to the expected $554 million. Despite big bets on the homegrown artificial intelligence system powering the Ernie chatbot, the financial return from this initiative cannot yet compensate for the overall weakness of the Chinese economy. The country is still reeling from the pandemic’s effects, and high youth unemployment has exacerbated the crisis in China’s real estate market. We’ll keep you updated on further developments.
AI Development and Future Prospects
In China, Baidu faces about 100 competitors in the development of artificial intelligence systems, notes NIX Solutions. However, Baidu has an advantage due to the huge amounts of data generated by its 200 million registered users, which it uses to train its large language model. This year, Baidu predicts that the Ernie chatbot alone will generate several hundred million dollars in additional revenue for the company. So far, Baidu is having some difficulty attracting third-party application developers to its large language model. According to Bloomberg Intelligence experts, there is currently a lot of excess capital in the artificial intelligence technology sector in China, and it will not reach profitability as quickly as investors and developers would like. For Baidu, a bet on the Apollo Go robotic taxi service may prove more profitable, with expectations to reach breakeven next year.