Baidu tops Q2 earnings on cloud momentum

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Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss second-quarter earnings for Baidu.

Video Transcript

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- Ticker symbol BIDU-- it's moving this morning after topping earnings estimates, on both the top and bottom line, as the Chinese web services company saw a 22% increase in their non-online marketing revenue, mostly driven by cloud and other AI-powered businesses. We're seeing shares, right now, still holding onto gains of about 1.7% here, pre-market.

And digging further into some of the earnings from Baidu here, they said, despite a challenging macro environment caused by COVID 19, the cloud revenues maintained rapid growth momentum. Get this-- 31%, year over year, for them.

- Eh, I think this is the first time I realized that the symbol for Baidu was-- it looks like a dog paw. I mean, that's pretty-- I never--

- Dog paw.

- I never noticed that. But again, one of the hottest tickers. There we are. There you see that blue dog paw for Baidu in their stock-- in their company name. I kind of dig that.

But look, stacking this quarter up-- and they're different companies, I understand. Stacking this quarter up against what we saw from Pinduoduo yesterday, it's just night and day.

You saw revenues down 4% here for Baidu year over year. Costs, I would argue also, too high relative to the sales growth trends they're seeing. They're trying to talk up a lot of the initiatives they're doing in cloud. Eh, doesn't really do it for me.

It looks like Pinduoduo is probably one of the better ways, if you want to invest in China, at least right now. Just those are the names you should be looking at.

- OK. So this, apparently for Baidu, and some of the other-- yes-- Chinese internet names that we've seen do well, they're all kind of moving in concert. But at the same time, when we see the marketing revenue side of the business, that they are also all citing-- we saw that with Pinduoduo.

How much does that actually continue to maintain some type of revenue that grows at this point in time, especially when you know that there's this pullback in marketing spending, in the face of this global economic slowdown, at least in the companies that are pulling back on their marketing spending? That's going to impact every single company that's on that board, whether it's a high conversion rate company in Alibaba or JD.com, or whether it's a Pinduoduo or a Baidu, as we were just discussing.

- Yeah. Look, good quarters. I think a lot of these quarters are surprising the market, especially a lot of these names were under pressure coming into these quarters. But Pinduoduo, for me-- and Jared has been flagging this company consistently over the past year-- that was just a home run quarter. I think it surprised a lot of folks. Again, also one of the hottest tickers on the site.

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