Macroeconomic Headwinds Affecting Ad Business, but Baidu's Investment Thesis Remains Intact
Baidu’s online advertising business accounted for 73% of Core revenue in 2022 and will be the main source of revenue in the medium term given its dominant market share for search engines, but we believe unless it can develop another industry-leading business, it could face long-term challenges for advertising dollars from growing competitors such as Tencent and ByteDance. Baidu is increasingly shifting its focus toward its cloud business and now also artificial intelligence, with its Ernie generative AI model becoming its flagship product. We believe that Baidu is an early mover and should benefit from China's AI development, but whether Ernie will be the long-term leader will depend on execution as we believe other resource-heavy companies have the potential to catch up to Baidu if there are missteps in its generative AI development.