The search engine posted a net profit of 7.56 billion yuan, or 1.03 billion euros. FLORENCE LO / REUTERS
The group, owner of the main Chinese search engine, is relying on artificial intelligence to revive itself.
Chinese internet giant Baidu reported lower net profit and revenue in 2022 on Wednesday, after a difficult year for the tech sector and the Chinese economy. The search engine posted a net profit of 7.56 billion yuan (1.03 billion euros), down 26% year on year, and a turnover of 123.68 billion yuan (16 .86 billion euros), down 1%.
«2022 has been a tough year, but we’ve used this time to prepare the business for better times“, said the CEO of the group, Robin Li, quoted in the press release. “In 2023, we believe we have a clear path to accelerate our revenue growth again, and we are now well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the economic recovery in China.“, he added.
The Beijing-based group, owner of the main search engine in China, is counting in particular on its long-term investments in artificial intelligence to revive itself, saying to itself “ready to take advantage of the impending inflection point” in this domain. Among the applications on which Baidu is working: the development of autonomous cars and cloud computing (“cloud“). Baidu announced in early February the launch in the test phase of its own conversational robot based on artificial intelligence, after that of ChatGPT, the American software that unleashes passions.
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A Baidu spokeswoman told AFP that the company “expected to be able to complete internal testing in Marchfrom his chatbot. Baptized “Ernie Bot“, it will then be put “available to the general publicon an unspecified date, she pointed out.
The group is one of the Chinese internet giants, such as Alibaba, Tencent and Netease, which are looking to take advantage of the recovery of the Chinese economy after the lifting of anti-Covid health restrictions and a semblance of easing in the takeover of the tech sector by the authorities. Since the end of 2020, the authorities have indeed been particularly intransigent against practices, in particular anti-competitive, in the technology sector that were previously tolerated and widely spread.
This strategy has a heavy impact for the companies concerned: the combined turnover of Chinese internet companies fell by more than 1% in 2022, to 1.460 billion yuan in 2022, the first decline in nearly 10 years. , according to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
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