On May 18, Baidu rose 5.25% in pre-market trading, trading at $142.0/share, with trading volume of $12.07 million. The rally was driven by stronger-than-expected Q1 earnings and a landmark shift in the company's revenue composition toward AI.
Baidu reported Q1 revenue of 32.08 billion RMB, surpassing analyst estimates of 31.34 billion RMB. Adjusted EPS came in at 12.06 RMB per ADS, beating the consensus of 11.54-11.84 RMB. Adjusted operating profit reached 3.81 billion RMB versus expectations of 3.34 billion RMB. Notably, AI business revenue hit 13.6 billion RMB, up 49% year-over-year and 21% sequentially, accounting for 52% of general business revenue for the first time — signaling a decisive pivot from traditional search advertising toward intelligent cloud, AI applications, and AI-native marketing.
CEO Robin Li attributed the AI cloud momentum to surging enterprise demand for generative AI training and inference services. Additionally, autonomous ride-hailing platform Apollo Go completed over 3.2 million fully driverless orders in Q1, up more than 120% year-over-year across 27 Chinese cities. JP Morgan has raised its price target on Baidu to $200, citing a value discovery phase around Baidu's AI infrastructure capabilities.
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