Baidu, China’s top search engine company, now gets more traffic on mobile than it does on desktop computers. This little nugget of info is hidden in plain sight in Baidu’s Q3 earnings report (PDF link), which came out last night. “This is quite significant,” says Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director of international communications, in an email exchange with Tech in Asia. “To be a bit more specific, average daily mobile traffic surpassed average daily PC traffic,” he adds, emphasizing that this refers to total traffic, not just search queries.
Baidu’s Q3 report was all about mobile. Aside from that major milestone, Baidu also saw mobile revenue contribute 36 percent of total revenue – another new high. In Baidu’s Q2 report, that proportion was 30 percent. In Q2 it surpassed 500 million active users on mobile, but there was no update on that figure for the most recent quarter.
Despite the promising mobile numbers, Baidu’s shares are likely to fall once Thursday trading commences due to the search titan missing market expectations on revenue, albeit by a relatively small amount.
Here are the main Q3 figures from Baidu:
- Total revenues of RMB 13.52 billion (US$2.2billion), up 52 percent from same period last year.
Mobile revenues of US$792 million, representing 36 percent of total.
Operating profit of RMB 3.92 billion (US$638.6 million), up 17.4 percent from Q3 2013.
Content costs were RMB 498.1 million (US$81.2 million), representing 3.7 percent of total revenues. That’s up from 2.5 percent of revenues a year ago.
Q4 outlook of RMB 13.85 billion (US$2.256 billion) to RMB 14.25 billion (US$2.322 billion) in revenue.
See: Alibaba’s IPO lifts Jack Ma to top of Forbes’ China Rich List for the first time
For first time ever, Baidu now sees most of traffic come from mobile
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