Chinese Internet giant Baidu on Thursday reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth in a year, as competition between the country’s top tech players intensifies.
Baidu is a key player in China’s technology industry, which once enjoyed years of rapid growth until Beijing imposed a regulatory crackdown on the industry from 2020.
The period of tough supervision now appears to be winding down as regulators look for ways to jump-start an economy that has failed to recover since tough pandemic measures were lifted in late 2022.
Beijing-based Baidu operates China’s leading search engine and derives much of its revenue from advertising.
The company achieved revenue of $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to an earnings report published Thursday on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
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The figure represents an annual increase of one percent — the lowest quarterly revenue growth recorded by Baidu since the last quarter of 2022.
Net income in the first quarter was $755 million, down 6% year over year.
The latest results come after Baidu announced a sharp 169 percent year-over-year rise in net income in 2023, according to annual results published in February.
Baidu faces increasingly formidable competition from domestic rivals including Tencent, the operator of the ubiquitous messaging platform WeChat, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
The company has invested in artificial intelligence, developing chatbot Ernie — the equivalent of ChatGPT, which is blocked in China.
Baidu has also expanded into the growing autonomous vehicle sector, with fleets of driverless taxis in Beijing and other cities across the country.
During a surprise visit to Beijing last month by Tesla boss Elon Musk, reports emerged that the US carmaker had struck a deal with Baidu to provide local mapping and navigation services.
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Baidu’s results announcement comes two days after a pair of its Chinese tech giants, Tencent and Alibaba, published earnings reports.
Tencent — one of the world’s top gaming companies with other businesses in messaging, streaming content and artificial intelligence — also on Tuesday reported its weakest quarterly revenue growth in a year.
On the same day e-commerce and technology giant Alibaba reported modest growth in its annual report for the fiscal year ended March 31, with revenue of $130.4 billion, up eight percent year-on-year.
Beijing is seeking to increase state support for an economy that has flagged in recent months as high youth unemployment and a spiraling real estate debt crisis threaten to slow growth.
Source: AFP