Baidu

Baidu was founded in Beijing’s Zhongguancun on January 1, 2000, initially as a search engine. Robin Li’s hyperlink-analysis technology formed part of its early technical background. The company subsequently expanded into speech, images, natural-language processing and knowledge graphs.⁠[1]

Eric Xu is Baidu’s other co-founder. As executive vice president and chief strategy officer, he helped develop the company from its early years through the 2005 IPO.⁠[2]

Baidu completed its Nasdaq IPO on August 5, 2005, at $27 per American depositary share. The company is headquartered in Beijing and uses a December 31 fiscal year-end.⁠[3]

Baidu launched Phoenix Nest in April 2009 for search-marketing management. Baidu Union extends advertising to partner websites and compensates them for traffic.⁠[3]

On October 1, 2013, Baidu acquired all of 91 Wireless, expanding into mobile-app distribution and related gaming operations. Its annual filing recorded approximately $1.849 billion in purchase consideration, distinct from valuations or rounded figures in earlier transaction announcements.⁠[4]

Following the Wei Zexi incident, a joint investigation led by China’s cyberspace regulator reported on May 9 that excessive bidding weight and unclear advertising labels could mislead users. Required measures included medical-advertising cleanup, stronger qualification checks, conspicuous labels and a 30% cap on paid promotions per results page.⁠[5]

On September 1, Baidu announced that PaddlePaddle, its deep-learning platform, would be open sourced under an Apache license, with a full GitHub release planned for September 30. It had already been used internally for advertising, search ranking, image classification, OCR and machine translation.⁠[6]

Baidu began autonomous-driving research in 2013 and launched Apollo as an open platform in 2017. Its activities developed across autonomous-driving systems, intelligent-vehicle solutions and driverless mobility services, spanning software development, vehicle integration and road operations.⁠[7]

Baidu listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March 2021 under stock code 9888, adding a secondary listing alongside Nasdaq.⁠[8]

On March 16, Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot for invited testers and opened enterprise API applications. Demonstrations covered writing, Chinese-language understanding and multimodal generation. The company acknowledged that feedback was still needed, while video generation remained restricted because of cost.⁠[9]

On June 30, Baidu open sourced ten ERNIE 4.5 models for text and multimodal tasks under Apache 2.0. Sizes ranged from a 0.3-billion-parameter dense model to a mixture-of-experts model with 424 billion total parameters and about 47 billion active parameters.⁠[10]

On January 1, Baidu announced a confidential Hong Kong listing application for Kunlunxin, a non-wholly-owned subsidiary, through a proposed H-share spin-off. Baidu expected to retain control if completed. The proposal remained subject to regulatory and market conditions; the announcement did not establish a completed listing.⁠[11]

The ERNIE team’s technical report described a unified autoregressive model for text, images, audio and video. Its ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts architecture shares an expert pool, while elastic training varies depth, width and routing sparsity to support different hardware and latency requirements.⁠[12]

Baidu reported 2025 revenue of RMB129.1 billion, down 3%. Under US GAAP, it recorded an operating loss of RMB5.8 billion and net income attributable to Baidu of RMB5.6 billion, alongside RMB16.2 billion in long-lived-asset impairment. Baidu Core was renamed Baidu General Business.⁠[13]

For the quarter ended June 30, Baidu reported RMB31.3 billion in revenue, down 4%, and RMB2.3 billion in attributable net income. AI Cloud Infrastructure revenue rose 50% to RMB7.3 billion, while legacy online marketing fell 19% to RMB13.1 billion.⁠[14]

On September 1, Baidu completed its Hong Kong listing-status conversion and became dual-primary listed on Nasdaq and HKEX. The company also reported an Apollo Go footprint across 28 cities, encompassing different testing and operating stages rather than full commercial service in every location.⁠[15]

The conversion involved no new-share issuance or fundraising. Ordinary shares and American depositary shares remained convertible, with each ADS representing eight Class A ordinary shares. Hong Kong’s renminbi and Hong Kong-dollar counters use codes 89888 and 9888 respectively.⁠[16]

Baidu subsequently announced that its Class A ordinary shares would enter both Shanghai–Hong Kong and Shenzhen–Hong Kong Stock Connect on September 7, enabling access through those channels for eligible mainland Chinese investors.⁠[17]

Baidu released Unlimited OCR 2 for long-document parsing. Sparse Reference Sliding Window Attention compresses cross-page text–visual interactions into a fixed-size reference set. The team reported nearly constant per-step decoding latency and memory usage as documents grow, and provided Transformers and SGLang inference examples.⁠[18]

On October 27, Baidu scheduled its third-quarter results for November 16 before the US market opened. As of October 30, those unreleased results could not be treated as confirmed financial performance.⁠[19]

Baidu reports two segments: Baidu General Business and iQIYI. The former encompasses the Baidu App mobile ecosystem, AI cloud infrastructure and platforms, applications including Wenku and Drive, and Apollo Go and DuerOS. Its technology stack connects PaddlePaddle, ERNIE models and consumer and enterprise applications.⁠[20]