Baidu (BIDU) đŸ’» - Share Chat

Stock Discussions
23

Hi, I’m not following these companies WRT to their financial positions but I can give my two cents from the consumer’s point of view.

Meituan.com (started as “Groupon” of China) and Dianping.com (which means “review” in Chinese and dominate that market in China) used to be two companies and by no means were small players in their respective fields before the merging. Their CEO, Xing Wang, is a quite famous entrepreneur. He founded the “twitter” (FanFou.com) of China years ago but banned by the Chinese government (it’s still alive today but it lost its chance to go big because of the ban), for the obvious reason, and that’s essentially the start of the “Weibo.com” (listed on NASDAQ) as well.

It’s true that they entered the food delivery market after Baidu, but I think they are better positioned and they’ve got a much better CEO to execute their plan. Baidu used to be invested in a big competitor of Meituan, called “eleme” (“ele.me”, which means “are you hungry” in Chinese) but I think they sold their stake (not sure if it’s all of them or not) to Alibaba and started their own food delivery business.

I don’t order much takeaways when I’m back in China, but I do see Meituan’s delivery men much much more than Baidu’s. In fact I can’t remember seeing any of Baidu’s delivery men.

Baidu is pretty much known as just a “search engine” company in China and they’ve not been very successful in other areas and I think it’s largely down to their CEO being too comfortable and lack of competitions in their own market for too long.

US has “FANG” or “FAANG”, China has “BAT” (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent). People have been saying that it should be just “AT” or something else + “AT” now. You can see why by just comparing the market cap of these companies.

5 Likes
24

Baidu said first-quarter revenue fell 7 per cent from a year earlier to Rmb22.5bn ($3.2bn) as advertisers in travel, autos and healthcare cut back on spending during the public health crisis. Revenue at its core search and news feed business fell even faster, sliding 13 per cent from the same period last year.

The epidemic had driven housebound Chinese users to spend more time on online entertainment platforms and advertisers had sought to follow this shift, said Raymond Feng of research firm Pacific Epoch.

“Universal search is facing a growth bottleneck as traffic stays locked inside apps like WeChat and Douyin,” said Alex Liu of China Renaissance. “It’s inevitable that advertisers will continue to migrate to mobile display ads in those apps.”

26

Baidu Inc stock?

27

What has happened to Baidu in the past two days? :astonished:

28

My guess would be something to do with this:

1 Like
29

Yeah, that’ll do it. Argh!

2 Likes
30

Please could the @Freetrade_Admin team have a look at allowing us to buy Baidu through our ISA’s?

A few competitors have this option so I thought it was worth the question!:smile:

1 Like
31

Not sure anyone is monitoring that account @LewisHarding

@Rajan07 @mynameisgeraint Might be able to share some insight as to why FT have this as non ISA.

1 Like
32

Thanks for flagging, will look into this with the team and get back to you.

2 Likes
33

Cheers Rajan! Much appreciated

2 Likes
34

Hey Rajan, please could you provide an update on Baidu and potential ISA & SIPP availability.

HL & T212 allow users to invest in BIDU this way.

I’d love to own the stock, but I only invest through my Freetrade ISA & SIPP!

1 Like
35

Hey Lewis. How are you?

Apologies for the delay in replying, I’ve been away and back in the office today. I’ll look into this and get back to you.

2 Likes
36

@LewisHarding - a quick interim update, can confirm it’s something that we’re looking at offering and will update when there’s news.

2 Likes
37

Now this stock is ISA-available, while #TAL and #PDD not
@Rajan07 do you know the reason?