Baidu Releases Impressive Q3 Earnings Report

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Baidu Releases Impressive Q3 Earnings Report

By: Doug Caverly
2010-10-22

The third quarter of this year was kind to Chinese search giant Baidu, judging from the company's own stats. Baidu released an earnings report late yesterday, and it beat most Wall Street analysts' estimates by a fair amount.

Financial experts thought Baidu would report something like $333.3 million in revenue. Instead, the company managed to report $337.2 million in revenue, which makes for a pretty impressive difference.

As for how Baidu performed in another respect, analysts imagined it would report earnings per share of $0.41. Baidu beat that by five cents, reporting earnings per share of $0.46.

Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, explained in a statement, "Strong execution on our initiatives to expand our customer base and enhance customer service drove another quarter of strong results. By focusing on continuously improving our online marketing system and customer engagement while building awareness of search engine marketing, we are successfully enhancing Baidu's position as a key enabler of China's Internet industry."

What's more, Baidu expects to be successful next quarter, as well, forecasting $354.2 million to $364.7 million in revenue versus estimates of $348.5 million.

Jennifer Li, Baidu's chief financial officer, said to account for the big rise, "We are pleased to have delivered record margins in the third quarter, even as we actively invested in sales and marketing, R&D; and network equipment. Looking forward, we will continue to invest aggressively to support Baidu's long-term growth."

So now Baidu's stock is trading up around five percent today, even though the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P; 500 are in more or less neutral territory at the moment.

If you're curious, Google's stock is also pretty close to neutral for the day, and on a one-year basis, Baidu's stock has gained 158 percent while Google's stock has only gone up 10 percent.

It's no secret that Baidu has beaten Google in terms of market share in China. At this point, it's just starting to be a question of whether investors will choose to support Baidu instead of Google regardless of tricky political and national affiliations.

About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, WebProNews, and SecurityProNews.


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