The stock price has soared and the market value has doubled. Has Baidu survived the trough?
Editor’s note: This article is from Interface News, reporter: Xiao Fang, editor: Wen Shuqi, reprinted with authorization.
Faced with the low market value this year, Baidu CEO Robin Li tried to give employees confidence: When every company has highlights and lows, no company can seize all the outlets and opportunities. Every company has its own. What Baidu excels at is driven by technological innovation.
After the release of the third quarter financial report of this year, Baidu’s stock price finally entered an upward period.
On December 30, Baidu’s stock price broke through US$220 in intraday trading, with a market value of more than US$70 billion, which doubled from the beginning of the year.
This has boosted the morale of Baidu. The most direct relationship between stock price rise and employees is the increase in option income. For the employees who joined at the beginning of this year, the income is particularly obvious. Many Baidu employees told Jiemian News that they believed that Baidu’s market value could rise to more than US$100 billion.
A few months ago, employees were not so optimistic—in March this year, Baidu’s stock price fell to less than US$90, and its market value was only around US$30 billion, the lowest share price in the last 7 years.
Until now, “BAT” is still a commonly used abbreviation for the Internet giants. But as the three big giants, Baidu has long been left behind by AT (Ali and Tencent).
In terms of market value, Baidu is not only far from Alibaba and Tencent’s market value of more than 500 billion US dollars, but the market value of rising stars such as Meituan and Pinduoduo has already exceeded 100 billion US dollars.
CEO Robin Li had to face this question: What happened to Baidu?
In the middle of this year, Robin Li frankly said that he was under pressure in the communication activity “Simple Date” with Baidu employees. But at the same time, the explanation he tried to give employees confidence is: When every company has highlights and lows, no company can seize all the outlets and opportunities. Every company has its own good and bad things. Innovation as the core drive is what Baidu excels at.
Faced with huge public opinion pressure, a Baidu executive also talked to Robin Li about the market value of Baidu. Robin Li’s reply was: “Why do I still work in the company for a long time every day? Because I believe in the value of Baidu Although the commercialization of Baidu’s AI business has not yet been implemented on a large scale and the value has not been reflected, it will be reflected one day.”
The above-mentioned executives told Jiemian News that ordinary employees put more pressure on management. Many employees will wonder whether Baidu has no future when they see the stock price. The management team needs to give employees more confidence in difficult times.
What happened to Baidu?
What happened to Baidu? Baidu management also conducted a lot of reflection.
In the years-long mobile Internet ferry ticket dispute, Baidu did not take advantage of it. Compared with national-level apps such as WeChat and Alipay, Baidu App, as a search portal, is still important and ranks very high, but it has to be admitted that the presence of this product is very low—and in this field The competition is coming to an end, and the mobile Internet has already entered the era of stock. In the battle of grabbing users, duration and usage scenarios, Baidu did not come up with a product that proved itself to the users.
In terms of the mobile content ecology, has Baidu not figured out what to do? In May of this year, Baidu Group Executive Vice President Shen Dou told Jiemian News that such a judgment is not an exaggeration.
But he explained that search engine companies will experience a cognitive upgrade. It’s not that Google never thought of doing information flow, but it just couldn’t do it because it doesn’t have its own content, so does Sogou. If you really look at search engine companies, Baidu’s perception is much ahead of the previous time.
“Today’s Toutiao’s approach to content and search is not a matter of advanced or backwardness, but that you start in a certain business and no one has started early. But regarding the content ecology of search, Baidu is definitely not Laggard.” Shen Shao said.
On the other hand, for the low market value, Baidu’s explanation is that in recent years, the company has been doing “things under the iceberg” whether it is in the mobile ecosystem or in the AI business.
In the mobile ecology, Baidu originally only provided search information, but now it needs to go further and provide services and transactions. It is necessary to provide more in-depth services in multiple vertical fields such as healthcare, express delivery, real estate, e-commerce, and even allow users to complete transactions in the Baidu App. It needs to build itself or cooperate with partners to build basic settings such as service ecology and payment. In the AI business, Baidu started from scratch, completed the landing of the business, and realized commercialization, which would take longer.
Communication is also an issue. The above-mentioned Baidu executives believe that the third important reason for Baidu’s difficulties is that, during the period of change, Baidu did not deliver what it was doing. Even if the management is confident in the company’s future, ordinary employees and the outside world have not received such positive signals.
A Baidu Smart Cloud employee told Jiemian News that every time he talks about customers being blocked, he will inevitably get frustrated. “Dasou (mobile ecology) is at least a mature business. Others also recognize that Baidu Cloud is a New business, without the aura of big search, feels very difficult.” Although Baidu Smart Cloud’s revenue is already the fastest growing part of the company’s revenue, it still cannot solve the marginal sense of business people outside of search.
After reflecting on the above issues, Baidu’s management reorganized all businesses before the third quarter of this year’s financial report, and divided them into three parts from the perspective of external communication and understanding logic.