Baidu Coming Back From The Second Listing

On the night of March 22, it was the eve of Baidu's second listing. Baidu's official video Number released a 2:21-second video with only sound and ripple. Starting from Baidu's NASDAQ listing in 2005, this video (or audio) records Baidu's voice over the past 16 years.

From "super girl" and "Jia Junpeng", once hot topics in Baidu search, to Baidu's Qiyi (now "iqiyi") video website online, from hesitation in the era of mobile Internet to "five rings on Baidu's unmanned car", from being splashed with water in the speech of founder Li Yanhong to the joke that "Baidu has become a unit of measurement" In 16 years, Baidu has experienced a star like rush hour, and in recent years, it has been more hesitating and suffering.

With the official completion of the second listing in Hong Kong on March 23, baidu is back in the spotlight. Before this, baidu US shares in just three months to complete the amazing "sprint.". On February 22 this year, Baidu's U.S. stock price reached 354.82 U.S. dollars, a record high.

The share price brings direct confidence to the company. Just a year ago, on March 18, Baidu's share price was only $82, the lowest in nearly a decade. Also around this period of time, Lin Mo (pseudonym), who has been working for Baidu for five years and is responsible for product operation, began to look for a job.

"At that time, I felt that everyone was suffering, but I still didn't find the direction in business." Lin Mo recalled to the 21st century economic reporter. For her and Baidu, it was a dark and silent period of unspeakable silence, but after seeing a few job opportunities, she still chose to stay in Baidu, "now everything is changing."

In his speech on the second listing, Li Yanhong regarded the second listing of Baidu as the starting point of starting again and starting again. After a long time of cold winter, baidu is undoubtedly adjusting its posture to embrace the future in a fuller state. However, in this process, how to motivate employees to follow their own technology vision and how to better convey Baidu's story to the capital market and the outside world are also the current propositions of this old technology enterprise.

the issue of going or staying

"Perhaps now is the most hesitating period."

In February 2016, in the CCTV documentary meet a big guy, Li talked about the pressure faced by Baidu when facing the host's questions. At that time, baidu had just experienced the hemophilia bar "being sold" event, and finally made the decision to "comprehensively stop the commercial cooperation of disease type post bar".

I'm afraid what Li didn't expect was that, three months later, Baidu would be pushed to the forefront of the storm because of the "Wei Zexi incident". Facing the settlement of the office of the Internet information technology and a series of rectification, the company's reputation also plummeted. Take the crown of technology, fall into the noise of mortal, baidu fell a body of ash.

But to be fair, despite the negative, baidu was still in the "bat" ranks at that time. "At the beginning of 2016, I didn't think too much about it. I just thought Baidu was a big factory. After joining, I was also rushing and concentrating on business." Lin Mo recalled to the 21st century economic reporter, but she also admitted that "gradually to the back will have a feeling of low tide."

In January 2017, baidu introduced Lu Qi, a silicon valley executive, as president and chief operating officer. A number of Baidu employees told the 21st century economic reporter that Lu Qi had a great influence on Baidu. "I feel that he will adjust Baidu's strategy as a whole, from the top to design and adjust, and throughout to affect everyone in Baidu." Lin Mo told reporters, "at that time, the company was also very confident about Baidu."

What internal staff didn't pay much attention to was that Baidu had fallen into the market value competition with Jingdong at that time. In July of the same year, baidu held the first developers' conference. By blowing the clarion call of artificial intelligence, Baidu's market value rose to $63.838 billion, opening a gap of more than $7 billion with Jingdong, barely keeping the name of bat.

However, artificial intelligence is a "double-edged sword", which not only brings Baidu new imagination space, but also becomes Baidu's biggest challenge. Gartner released the annual maturity curve of emerging technologies in July 2017. AI applications represented by "virtual assistant" and "intelligent robot" are on the verge of expected inflation, and the period of disillusionment is coming.

"From technical maturity to commercial maturity, it takes a long time cycle." In an interview with the 21st century business reporter, a business director of a global technology company said frankly, "the most cutting-edge technology research and development will even take more than a decade to mature."

The process of waiting for technology to mature is undoubtedly a torment. At that time, baidu faced the pressure of capital and technology. In the mobile era, Baidu's revenue growth has slowed down. Li Yanhong said in the program that the decline of PC search is the general trend. As users' attention shifts to app, the weight of search engine becomes weaker and faces the traffic segmentation of a number of Internet companies.

At the same time, baidu AI field of high investment is difficult to get immediate results, the contradiction has begun to appear. According to the data, baidu set up a deep learning laboratory in 2013, and Baidu's R & D investment increased by 78.2% to 4.107 billion yuan, two years later, Baidu's R & D investment exceeded 10 billion yuan, while the net profit in 2016 was only 11.632 billion yuan.

Under the contradiction between investment and income, there is also pressure from the public and internal confidence of employees. In fact, even those who have left Baidu actively or passively over the past few years are hard to be listed. In 2017 alone, Baidu's management staff, including Wu Enda, Wang Jin, Zeng Liang, Chen Jinhui, Zhang Zhenghua and Lu Fubin, left.

In 2018, Lurgi withdrew from Baidu, and the company fell into a new confusion. In 2019, Baidu's resignation list was even so long that it was unsettling. Xiang Hailong, the person in charge of the search company, and his subordinates, such as Wu Haifeng, Zheng Zibin, sun Wenyu, and so on, sent news of his resignation.

"After Lu Qi left, everyone was less confident." Lin Mo pointed out to reporters, "at that time, there were a lot of excellent talents in the loss."

"In the bull market of technology stocks in the past five years, Baidu's performance is really unsatisfactory. The total increase in five years is only about 25%, which is significantly lower than that of Alibaba and Tencent. It is also far less than the 170% of American peer Google." Focusing on Baidu's stock price performance in the past, Wu Yijie, space China business school, University of Hong Kong, told 21st century economic reporter.

change

Also in 2019, Xiaoxin (alias) who has joined Baidu for more than three years is considering whether to look at other opportunities.

"Thinking about whether to go to Microsoft or other technology companies." He told the 21st century economic reporter. The programmer with technical background has complex in his heart. Following the steps of technical bull is obsessive in his mind.

At that time, Xiang Hailong had already left. Shen Shuo, who joined Baidu in 2012, became his successor. The turmoil in the internal management of search also began to spread downward. The newly established mobile ecological business group (MBG) was undergoing major adjustment, and even it was reported that personnel optimization would be carried out.

But after thinking twice and again, Xiaoxin still stayed in Baidu, "I still want to wait and see.".

When Shen Shuo took office, the obvious signal is to start mobile ecological business. At least now, it is still the basic disk of Baidu, and also the basis of AI investment in the future. At the same time, Shen Shuo is also leading Baidu mobile to explore new directions.

"In the early days of searching, links are shallow, and it's most efficient." Previously, in an interview with the 21st century economic reporter, Shen Shuo said that today Baidu's idea is to go deep into the vertical category, to do services, so as to better meet the one-stop needs of users.

At the same time, baidu is also trying to reach users through different content forms, such as purchasing YY live broadcast and powering small video, so as to enhance its new commercial liquidity ability. According to the data, in December 2020, the number of monthly active users of Baidu app reached 544 million, and the daily login users accounted for more than 70%, an increase of 18 percentage points year-on-year.

In addition, in December 2020, the number of creators of 100 brands reached 3.8 million, of which the number of original authors was nearly three times that of a year ago; the number of active users of Baidu smart apps reached 414 million (including open source apps), and the number of smart apps increased by 124% year-on-year; more than 300000 hosting page customers used Baidu marketing cloud service platform, and the revenue from hosting pages accounted for Baidu's core online marketing service revenue The proportion of the total number of employees increased to one-third. This also means that Baidu mobile ecology has taken its own steps in the diversification of commercial realization.

In addition to the company's business direction gradually clear, to give internal staff confidence, Lin Mo told the 21st century economic report reporter that after he went out to find a circle, although he had a higher salary job, he still felt that Baidu still had its own charm.

"I like Baidu's simple and reliable culture." Lin Mo told reporters, "at the same time, there are also some humanized designs within the company, which respect employees very much. Some Internet companies with rapid development are still more difficult to compare with Baidu in these aspects."

"Simple and reliable" is Baidu's cultural values. On the night of March 23, Li sent his first letter to shareholders, in which he explained in detail how the 21 year old technology company focused on technology and how to pursue the dream of "technology changing the world". When talking about Baidu culture, Li Yanhong pointed out that simplicity and dependability are the culture extended from the beginning of Baidu company.

"Among them," simple "means that the product should be simple and easy to use. It also means that the interpersonal relationship of the company is simple, there is no office politics, and the words are straightforward. "Dependability" means that everyone has a responsibility, is reliable, makes people feel at ease, and always delivers the best results to the next link. " Li said.

A number of Baidu employees who have experienced many Internet enterprises also said frankly that "Baidu is the best" and "Baidu is the most humane to employees". An employee pointed out that Baidu's technology atmosphere is relatively strong, "just do the technology at ease.".

future

Within this year, Lin Mo feels Baidu is changing. "The direction of AI is gradually advancing and landing, and there are also some substantial progress. The outside world can gradually understand the story of AI."

AI and technology are regarded as Baidu's future. In Li's shareholder letter, referring to Baidu in the future, he gave a great deal of elaboration on artificial intelligence, "in the era of artificial intelligence, we will make cars intelligent, let our homes become intelligent, let cities become intelligent, and let everything intelligent."

Li also pointed out that there will be eight key technologies in AI in the next decade, including autonomous driving, digital city operation, machine translation, biological computing, deep learning framework, knowledge management, AI chip and personal intelligent assistant.

In his opinion, thanks to the long-term layout and innovative path selection, baidu may be the only participant in the world that runs through all these links, "which will enable us to take the lead and benefit from the rapid development of the industry to the greatest extent."

From the perspective of five years ago, AI is like a bet made by Baidu. As an old-fashioned Internet enterprise which once accounted for more than 90% of the advertising business and more than 50% of the profit margin, if it wants to turn around in the declining state, it needs not only determination, but also opportunities of the times, but also internal and external trust.

Fortunately, Baidu has been waiting for the dawn. According to Baidu's financial report in 2020, in the fourth quarter of 2020, baidu achieved revenue of 30.3 billion yuan (about 4.64 billion US dollars), an increase of 5% year-on-year. Baidu core (mobile ecology, search, AI) achieved revenue of 23.1 billion yuan (about 3.54 billion US dollars) in the fourth quarter, a year-on-year increase of 6%, and non marketing revenue reached 4.2 billion yuan (about 645 million US dollars), up 52% year-on-year.

Among them, the rapid growth of non marketing revenue benefits from AI new business represented by intelligent cloud, intelligent driving and other frontier businesses. In the executive conference call after the release of the financial report, Yu Zhengjun, baidu CFO, also admitted that the growth was beyond expectations because of the emergence of a large number of new businesses.

"Intelligent transportation is part of the cloud computing business, growing more than 67% in the fourth quarter, mainly because we have a very strong operating system, and this growth is expected to continue into 2021." "Automatic driving service, for example, will also help," Yu said

In the face of Baidu Apollo business, the capital market will gradually give valuation from the second half of 2020. Earlier, Mizuho, an internationally renowned investment bank, raised Baidu's target price to $325. The main driver is that the agency has raised the valuation of Baidu's autonomous driving business to $40 billion from $20 billion before.

"At present, there are about 270 million passenger cars in China. According to the 20% penetration rate, the total market size of automatic driving is nearly 500 billion yuan. " Relevant analysts explained in their research paper that the Chinese government is vigorously promoting the landing and application of automatic driving in most cities in China, which will help the wide application of Baidu's intelligent driving technology.

"Baidu has now made changes, looking for new technological opportunities and investing heavily in high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence vehicles, AI chips and cloud services." Wu Yijie pointed out, "if Baidu can uphold the spirit of continuous innovation and become the leader in any of the above-mentioned science and technology fields, it will bring leap forward progress in the future."

Today, Baidu, once again stepping into the Hong Kong stock market, undoubtedly has more ammunition. For internal and external confidence, it is undoubtedly a boost. However, the performance of Baidu's Hong Kong stock market since its listing is still unsatisfactory, although it is more affected by external factors. But it also shows that Baidu needs to better deliver its story to the Hong Kong stock market.

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