Baidu on November 12, 2024 unveiled glasses with built-in AI assistants, launching a Chinese rival to Meta Ray-Ban, which has achieved rare success with AI-powered hardware.
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BEIJING – Chinese tech giant Baidu on Thursday reported a 3% annualized revenue decline in its third quarter, but still beat market expectations on growth in its AI cloud.
Revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30 was $4.78 billion. Net income increased 14% to $1.09 billion.
Baidu said its non-online marketing revenue surged 12% to the equivalent of $1.1 billion, mainly driven by its artificial intelligence cloud business.
Here’s what analysts expect the company to report this quarter, based on LSEG estimates.
Revenue: $4.63 billion Net income: $857.17 million
Baidu had reported revenue of 34.45 billion yuan ($4.75 billion) and net profit of 6.68 billion yuan for the third quarter of 2023.
Beijing-based Baidu operates one of China’s major web browser search engines and a heavily used mapping app. The company also sells cloud computing services. Online marketing accounts for a significant portion of the company’s revenue.
In the field of artificial intelligence, Baidu is touting its Ernie chatbot as a local alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is not available in China. Baidu announced last week that Ernie bot now has 430 million users.
The company also announced this month that Xiaodu AI Glasses will start selling in the first half of next year. The wearable device will have at least one camera and will use Ernie’s AI capabilities and Baidu’s maps and search capabilities. Baidu has not disclosed pricing, but the product is widely expected to be a Chinese-made alternative to Meta’s popular Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Baidu last month announced leadership changes, with former head of mobile ecosystem group Junjie He appointed as the company’s interim chief financial officer and former CFO Rong Luo appointed as head of mobile division. .
