Better than expected! Baidu's core net profit increased 17% YoY in Q3, with Ernie Bot's daily API calls reaching 1.5 billion.
On the evening of November 21, Baidu released its Q3 2024 financial report, showing total quarterly revenue of RMB 33.6 billion, with Baidu Core revenue at RMB 26.5 billion. Net profit attributable to Baidu Core reached RMB 7.54 billion, up 17% year-over-year, exceeding market expectations. The report revealed that in November, the daily average calls to the ERNIE large model reached 1.5 billion, a 30-fold increase from the 50 million calls disclosed in Q4 last year.
"The growing number of ERNIE model calls demonstrates that our strong AI capabilities are gaining broader market recognition," said Robin Li, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Baidu. "We remain committed to our AI-centric strategy and are confident in our long-term growth. As we further scale AI applications, we will explore with greater confidence how AI can drive innovation and create value for consumers, businesses, and society as a whole."
The financial report showed that in Q3, Baidu launched two enhanced lightweight models, ERNIE Speed Pro and ERNIE Lite Pro, further enriching the ERNIE model series. As of November, the PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem had attracted 18.08 million developers.
According to the report, Baidu App's monthly active users reached 704 million in September, up 6% year-over-year. During the quarter, Baidu Core's online marketing revenue was RMB 18.8 billion. Baidu continues to advance the restructuring of search with large models and enriches the search experience through intelligent agents and other content. Public data shows that the Baidu ERNIE Agent Platform already hosts 150,000 enterprises and 800,000 developers. At the recent Baidu World conference, Baidu Wenku and Baidu Netdisk jointly launched the tool-based intelligent agent "Free Canvas," which garnered over 200,000 reservations on its first day.
In the intelligent cloud business, according to IDC's "China AI Public Cloud Services Market Share, 2023" report released in August, Baidu Intelligent Cloud ranked first for the fifth consecutive year. Public data shows that the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Qianfan large model platform has helped customers fine-tune 33,000 models and develop 770,000 enterprise applications. Baidu Intelligent Cloud boasts the largest industrial deployment scale for large models in China, with over 60% of central state-owned enterprises and numerous private enterprises collaborating with Baidu Intelligent Cloud on AI innovation.
In the autonomous driving sector, as of October 28, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service had provided over 8 million rides nationwide, with 988,000 rides in Q3 alone, up 20% year-over-year. Currently, the sixth-generation autonomous vehicles are operating on public roads in multiple Chinese cities. $BIDU-SW(09888.HK) $Baidu(BIDU.US)
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