Way more than searching engine.
Baidu owns the biggest search engine in China, so often is called "the $GOOG (Alphabet) of china"
Its advertising business contributes the most revenue to the company...but latly their investments in:
Robotaxis.
Autonumos driving.
Ai.
Cloud.
Health.
All this makes Baidu something more complex than a simple " Searching Engine"
?️ Cash Position and Future investment!
Analyzing the company, certainly what impresses Baidu in a positive way is the available cash (currently free cash flow $18.9b) at the beginning of the year was $25b ... considering the marketcap of $73b this is a disproportionate amount of cash available for any future investments!
Management has stated that they have no plans in the immediate future to introduce a dividend ... so all the money will be used to grow and expand (and honestly that's what I want to see in a company like this)
Where Baidu has clearly said to use its money in the future and strongly focus on APOLLO auto platform and AI. The company's aim is to create an autonomous driving ecosystem!
Big partnerships for this reason with:
$NVDA (NVIDIA Corporation) for chipmakers
Tomtom Mapping
$MSFT (Microsoft) for the cloudservice
Blackbarry for Operating system
? Important note is that Baidu is the only company to have co-licensed licenses with the Chinese government for autonomous driving and testing on public roads!
In fact, the first and only taxis currently on the streets of Beijing are Apollo!
Given these licenses and collaboration with the government, the Autonomous driving of Apollo vehicles is at the highest existing level "LEVEL 4"
?️Risks
Sec investigation regarding the purchase of YY live ($ 3.5b)
▪︎ China regulation
▪︎Delisting
▪︎Uncertainty on growth side with the latest ▪︎Investments and use of the freecash available! Competitors
As in all investments there are risks ... and therefore there are also for Baidu, but as for $BABA (Alibaba) also in this case I think there will be no long term problems!
?️ What im doing?
I'm very bullish on baidu, I think they have a very big competitive advantage due to the licenses with the government and the incredible cash position towards the competitors!
Currently Baidu is my largest position on my portfolio, i plan to add more if it continue to dip!
KLAUDIO
by @Klaudiano13
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