Baidu beats forecasts on ad sales, AI demand

Reuters Videos
3 年前

Chinese online search giant Baidu beat forecasts on Thursday (August 12).

It was boosted by a rebound in ad sales, and strong demand for its artificial intelligence and cloud computing products.

That saw revenue hit just over $4.8 billion in the latest quarter, slightly ahead of analyst estimates.

Adjusted profits also did better than expected.

Autonomous driving technology was among the products to see a strong rise in demand.

That helped Baidu diversify, offsetting competition from giants like Alibaba and ByteDance in its core search business.

Streaming is also doing well.

Affiliate iQIYI saw its advertising revenue rise by 15%, while subscribers numbers passed 106 million.

But the company dubbed China's Google faces increasing scrutiny from regulators.

Recent months have seen Beijing watchdogs crack down on alleged anti-competitive practices by the country's tech titans.

They have raised concerns over Baidu's data security and user privacy.