China’s search engine giant Baidu reported a 1% revenue growth for the March quarter,Happy (2015) landing at RMB 31.5 billion ($4.37 billion), as its core advertising business has not rebounded strongly due to the weak micro-economy in the country. The company recorded a net profit of RMB 5.4 billion during the period. Artificial intelligence-related revenues accounted for 6.9% of total cloud business revenues, according to the report, with chief executive Robin Li expressed his confidence in AI will bring “sustained growth” in revenue and profit in the long run. Li explained the company’s advertisers, mostly SMEs, have been “hit hard” in the Covid time, which has led to weakness in its core advertising revenues. In the meantime, he added that the company sees “limited visibility improvement” in the advertiser sentiment for the second quarter. [Baidu]
