Baidu’s Mobile Reach Expanded to 1.1 Billion Monthly Active Devices in March 2019

By PRNewswire On May 20, 2019

Baidu, Inc. (“Baidu” or the “Company”), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2019.

“Baidu’s mobile foundation continues to strengthen with search-powered AI, and our new AI businesses are making strong progress. In March, Baidu’s mobile reach expanded to 1.1 billion monthly active devices, while DuerOS voice assistant installed base reached 275 million devices and generated 2.37 billion monthly voice queries. We are leveraging Baidu AI to provide enterprise solutions to businesses and local governments, which significantly expands our total addressable market,” said Robin Li, Chairman and CEO of Baidu. “Looking ahead, we are quite excited about the opportunities to significantly improve content and service discovery through in-app search and increase customer ROI with our entrance into CRM, to deepen our offering to our marketing customers.”

“Baidu Q1 results were solid, with revenues reaching RMB 24.1 billion, up 15% year over year, or 21% year over year, excluding revenue from divested business, and margins were dampened by our successful CCTV New Year Eve Gala marketing campaign, which accelerated the traffic of Baidu family of apps and highlighted better in-app search user experience.” said Herman Yu, CFO of Baidu. “Despite government policies to improve the market condition for SMEs, we anticipate online marketing in the near term to face a challenging environment. We will take this opportunity to improve our monetization capabilities and review our businesses for operational efficiency, while recognizing the importance to invest for sustainable long-term growth.”

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First Quarter 2019 Financial Highlights

(in millions, except for per ADS information, unaudited)		Consolidated
		For the three-month ended March 31,
	2018		2019	YOY	YOY^[2]	2019
	RMB		RMB			USD
Total revenues	20,907		24,123	15%	21%	3,594

Operating income (loss)	4,568		(936)	(120%)		(139)
Operating margin	22%		(4%)			(4%)
Non-GAAP operating income^[3]	5,371		401	(93%)		60
Non-GAAP operating margin	26%		2%			2%

Net income (loss) attributable to Baidu	6,694		(327)	(105%)		(49)
Net margin	32%		(1%)			(1%)
Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu	4,817		967	(80%)		144
Non-GAAP net margin	23%		4%			4%

Diluted earnings (loss) per ADS	18.68		(0.98)	(105%)		(0.15)
Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS	13.69		2.77	(80%)		0.41

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Management Change

Hailong Xiang, senior vice president of the search business, has tendered his resignation, and the Company has accepted Hailong’s resignation and thanks him for fourteen years of service at Baidu.

The Company has promoted Dou Shen to senior vice president, overseeing Baidu’s mobile business, previously known as the search business. Previously, Dou served as vice president of Baidu’s mobile products, overseeing the development of Baidu App, Haokan short video app and Baidu smart mini program. Dou has served in various other roles at Baidu since joining in 2012, including web search, display advertising and the financial services group. Prior to Baidu, Dou worked in the adCenter group at Microsoft and sold Buzzlabs, a social media monitoring and analysis platform company that he co-founded, to IAC-owned CityGrid Media. Dou received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from North China Electric Power University, a master’s degree in engineering from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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