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Investing.com-- Baidu Inc’s Hong Kong shares fell on Thursday after the Chinese internet giant clocked middling second-quarter earnings that left investors wanting for more returns on the company’s massive AI spending bill.
Baidu Inc (HK:9888) (NASDAQ:BIDU) fell as much as 3% to HK$84.60 and was among the biggest weights on the Hang Seng index, which shed 0.3%.
Baidu on Wednesday reported second quarter revenue of 32.71 billion yuan ($4.56 billion), just below street estimates of 32.92 billion yuan. The print also fell from revenue of 33.93 billion yuan a year ago.
The company’s Q2 earnings per share was 13.58 yuan, just above expectations of 13.33 yuan.
But investors appeared to be largely underwhelmed by the revenue drop, especially as returns from Baidu’s AI ventures were insufficient in offsetting a decline in the company’s core digital advertising business.
Baidu’s ad business revenue fell 15% in Q2, while its cloud revenue, which represents its AI efforts, rose 27% year-on-year.
The company has aggressively invested in AI over the past two years, ramping up new releases of its flagship Ernie bot while also building out more cloud capacity.
But this has yielded limited success, both in user counts and monetization. Baidu CEO Robin Li flagged a prudent approach towards AI monetization in a post-earnings call, stating that the internet giant will prioritize user experience.
Baidu, along with its other Chinese AI peers, also faces growing headwinds from Beijing’s pushback against American-made AI chips, especially from Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD).
China was seen encouraging AI developers to use more locally-made AI chips from companies such as Huawei, amid a growing dispute with the U.S. over chip exports and restrictions.