While that Microsoft-Yahoo business stole the show for a while, Baidu’s found its way into the spotlight again. The Chinese search engine company had an admirable second quarter, beating analysts’ estimates in some important respects.
Net income is perhaps the most interesting category. The figure reported here – $38.6 million – represents an increase of 86.7 percent over the same period last year. It’s a rare American corporation that has been able to achieve anything like that lately.
Robin Li
Then there’s the matter of a customer base. Baidu managed to attract more than 181,000 new online marketing clients between the first and second quarters, which works out to growth of about 12.4 percent. This isn’t amazing, but remains respectable.
Baidu’s future looks bright, too. Some problems the company experienced due to the earthquake have passed, and as people continue to get excited about the Olympics, Baidu expects its total revenues to rise another 13 to 16 percent during the third quarter.
All this good news caused Robin Li, Baidu’s chairman and CEO, to state, “Our ability to make such progress was due to the appreciation of paid search by our loyal small and medium sized enterprise customers as well as a growing appreciation of search engine marketing by large enterprises in China.”
The news also caused investors to drive up Baidu’s stock by 12.92 percent in pre-market trading.
