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spk06: Ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by for Baidu's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. And I'd like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's conference, Juan Lin, Baidu's Director of Investor Relations.
spk03: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Baidu's fourth quarter and full year 2020 conference call. Baidu's earnings release was interviewed earlier today, and you can find a copy on our website as well as on the website. And for today, we have Robin Li, our co-founder and chief executive. Chief Financial Officer, Ann Dolshan, Executive Vice President, in charge of Search and Feed. After our prepared remarks, we will hold our Q&A session. Please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited, to those outlined in our public filing with ICC, including our annual report on Form 20-F. Baidu does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law. Our earnings press release and this call include discussions between unaudited non-GAAP financial experts. We have made minor adjustments to our . Our press release to the most directly comparable gap measures and is available on our website at ir.baidu.com. As a reminder, this conference will be recorded. In addition, a webcast of this conference call will also be available on Baidu's IR website. I will now turn the call over to .
spk11: Good morning, everyone. Baidu delivered another solid quarter in Q4. despite the core revenue reaching RMB 23.1 billion, that's 3.5 billion U.S. dollars, which is up 6% year-over-year and up 8% quarter-on-quarter. The latter was much higher than our historical flattish or low single-digit growth from Q3 to Q4. In addition to the improvement of macroeconomic conditions in China, we are benefiting from the digitalization of industrial internet. I think for non advertising revenue in the fourth quarter grow 52% year over year to an annualized run rate of US dollar 2.6 billion, driven by the convergence of AI solution, cloud services, and consumer internet. Such convergence is expected to accelerate into the next decade, and Baidu stands to benefit from it. Let me elaborate on the trend that we are seeing, starting from smart transportation. China aims to reap its global competitiveness in the transport sector through aggressive infrastructure building. The Chinese government is promoting a multi-year plan to install smart transportation networks in cities with sensors and cameras on public roads, connecting vehicles with roadside units to foster safer driving, improve throughput, and reduce carbon emissions. Such government initiative encourages municipal governments to shift their budget toward a more software-defined transportation network. Apollo's strong brand in intelligent driving and our holistic approach to smart transportation makes us well-suited to capture the opportunities in smart transportation infrastructure development. For example, Baidu signed a strategic partnership with Guangzhou in southern China to deploy the world's first multi-model autonomous driving mobility as a service, or MAP, platform. Utilizing Apollo robot taxi and robot bus, Guangzhou begins this month to allow commuters in the Huangpu District to call up public transport services on demand in lieu of taxes, ride-hailing, and other traditional gasoline-powered public transport services. The Guangzhou Smart Transportation Project takes advantage of Baidu's leading autonomous driving technologies and Baidu Cloud's strong technology infrastructure, as well as leveraging the reach of Baidu ADP and Baidu Maps to enable locals easy access to Apollo Maps. For Enterprise Cloud, we are seeing ad customers subscribing to Baidu Cloud due to our strong internet foundation. For example, a major e-commerce company and existing ad customer began using our cloud services a year ago. In the past year, the ad customer saw its business grow to massive scale. When the customer realized that Baidu AI Cloud was able to support businesses with over 100 million daily users and enabled them to expand rapidly, the app customers increased its purchase of Baidu Cloud services by 82 fold from a year ago. Over time, we believe Baidu AI Cloud stands to benefit from our existing advertiser base of hundreds of thousands of enterprises, as well as our provider neutrality status. In the face of enterprise customers adopting multi-cloud provider strategies. From this example, we see strategic advantage of concurrently operating in the AI solution, cloud services, and internet market. As enterprises and the public sector embrace digital transformation to strengthen and expand their relationships with their customers and constituent online. As we enter the next decade, Baidu is well positioned as a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation to seize the huge market opportunities in cloud services, autonomous driving, smart transportation, and other AI-powered areas. Turning to Q4, operating highlights. Let me start with AI Cloud. Baidu Cloud continues to be number one in China's AI public cloud market, per IDC's latest report, marking the third time that Baidu has topped the list. Baidu AI Cloud offers a full suite of cloud services and solutions, and is differentiated in the market with our use of AI to our cloud solutions and improve our customers' operational efficiency, and service level. Our AI solutions are demonstrating scalability and replicability across multiple industry sectors. For example, our AI call center solution, which uses Baidu's brain to handle customer calls with conversational AI, is going repeat purchases. Our first key customer, a major telecom operator have followed up with two more purchases of our AI call center and installed them in their customer service centers nationwide. As we strive for customer satisfaction and best-in-class solutions, our AI call center solution has successfully expanded from telecom into other sectors, including airlines, financial services, energy, and automobiles. Through greater industry adoption, model training time has dropped by more than 50%, and the project implementation has been shortened to one month. In the area of vertical cloud, the smart transportation project with Guangzhou serves as a lighthouse project for other cities to follow. The deployment of ApolloMath allowed commuters to order global taxi and global bus in place of taxi rides or other public transportation. The implementation of B2X smart road infrastructure equips 102 intersections and the streets in the knowledge city district of Guangzhou with cameras and sensors, enabling better traffic management. Commercial vehicles entering the vicinity are installing dual-OS-powered rear-view mirrors to enable traffic violation enforcement, even if the license plate of a violating vehicle is covered by mud. The Guangzhou project uses Apollo ACE transportation engine, which, in essence, is a transportation cloud solution. It processes traffic information from ApolloMAS and B2S, dual OS connected vehicles, and Baidu Maps. It provides traffic agencies better information to improve traffic management and transportation services, and it enables Apollo and other compatible vehicles better understanding of surrounding traffic conditions. Similarly, we recently signed a second contract with the city of Baoding, to expand coverage of Apollo smart transportation in their city. Our strategic partnership with Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Chongqing, to name a few, to provide smart transportation is becoming an important milestone in the development of modern cities, serving as a means for the public sector to use AI to improve metropolitan traffic, public transportation, and air quality. Turning to intelligent driving, we continue to invest aggressively in self-driving technology for passenger vehicles and robot taxi fleet management. Apollo was once again ranked number one in China for autonomous driving, according to the 2020 Beijing Autonomous Vehicle Road Tester Report. The report is highly respected in the industry as Beijing Traffic Authority closely monitors autonomous driving test miles. Apollo accumulated test miles reached 4.3 million in December. Apollo has been granted China's first driverless testing permit and is the only Chinese company to be granted driverless testing permit from both California and China. In terms of autonomous driving operational experience, Apollo robot taxi and robot bus fleet have provided over 210,000 rides to the public as of December 2020. We are proud that dual OS for auto, our operating system-powered auto infotainment, has been installed in over 1 million new vehicles just last year. pointing to two market trends. One, mobile, home, and in-vehicle internet are converted. Baidu's internet platform, designed to draw synergy across usage platforms, enables dual OS for auto to leverage the large developer community for Baidu smart mini program to populate the skill store. And at the same time, Consumers benefit from the consistency and familiarity of dual-OS skills developed from mobile and home environment. Two, new car buyers are turning to best-in-class self-driving capabilities so that they can do more and enjoy their ride in cars. The race toward building new vehicles with better self-driving capabilities through AI creates a big opportunity for buyers. Let me talk about the progress of Apollo Self-Driving, or ASD, which includes HDMAPS, AVP, and AMP. To date, we have signed strategic partnerships with 10 leading automakers to power their new vehicle models with Apollo Self-Driving services. FIDO is uniquely positioned to offer high-definition maps, or HDMAPS, a critical component for self-driving to top automakers in China. We have invested in Baidu Maps for many years and are one of the very few companies in China offering HD maps. Last month, WM Motor, a leading Chinese eBay maker, announced the mass production of their new W6 SUV due to release in the first half of this year. with Apollo Automated Valid Parking, or AVP, a Level 4 service option. We are excited to announce that we will be taking orders of Apollo Autonomous Navigation Pilots, or A&P, which is based on Apollo's leading autonomous driving technology. This comes timely as MIIT China's transport agency released this draft regulation to allow highway testing of autonomous driving. We believe end-to-end integration of hardware and software will make the best vehicle. That's why we are in the process of setting up an intelligent EV company, and we have entered into strategic partnership with multinational automaker Zhejiang Jili Holding Group to offer automobile design and manufacturing for Baidu's new EV company. Geely holds the distinction of best-selling Chinese automobile brands in past years under the Volvo and Geely brands. By conveying Baidu's expertise in autonomous driving and smart transportation with Geely's expertise as a leading automobile and EV manufacturer, we hope to pave the way for the future passenger vehicles. Turning to DuoOS, which continues to see strong adoption. Monthly watch queries from third-party devices reached 3.6 billion, that's up 66% year over year. And DuoOS skill store now offers over 4,400 skills. Our focus on user experience through leading AI capabilities has made Xiaodu smart display number one in global shipments again. according to all three market research firms, IDC, Strategy Analytics, and Canalys, for the third quarter of 2020. Turning to mobile ecosystem. In December, MAU's Baidu app reached 544 million. The number of creators on Baidu nearly tripled. The total number of smart mini programs grew 124% from a year ago. The MAU's smart community program reached 414 million. This number points to a thriving internet platform that is attracting a large number of third-party creators, publishers, and service providers. The same trend can be seen in our vertical and community efforts. For example, on a quarter-over-quarter basis, Daily average viewership of videos on Baidu Health grew 92%, and daily average live video sessions hosted by healthcare professionals grew 163%. E-commerce touches the lives of 1.16 billion internet users each month in China. Through our AI building blocks, we enable users to have single log-ons meaning that a user can log into our app to check his or her express delivery status or some express delivery because just by searching and clicking the applicable delivery company search result. The service convenience of our AI building blocks enable daily express delivery service usage to surpass four million times just a month after going live in Baidu app. The vibrancy of our mobile ecosystem allows third-party services to quickly ramp up, and our search nature supports the survival of long-tail services. Daily logging users on Baidu apps surpassed 70%, up 18 points from a year ago, which creates a strong foundation for further growth of third-party services and non-advertising offerings on Baidu. On monetization, for the fourth quarter, revenue for managed page reached a third of Baidu Core's online marketing revenue, up from less than 24% a year ago. Over 300,000 managed page customers have adopted Baidu Marketing Cloud, which enables them to purchase marketing services, build audience, generate themes, and maintain lifetime relationships with consumers through the tools and services offered on our hosted platform. Our marketing cloud provides CRM-like services, for example, allowing merchants to message customers who have previously interacted with them. Such CRM features facilitate retargeting and other measures to improve overall marketing effectiveness. We aim to integrate YY onto our platform in a deep and thorough way. Comparing with other large mobile ecosystems, our non-advertising revenue represents a much smaller percentage, which means there is a huge potential for upside. The YY acquisition will help speed up the development of our non-ad revenue. We will allow YY broadcasters to increase their fans following on Baidu. Hundreds of millions of Baidu users will be able to enjoy more live streaming content through Baidu app and how kind short video and Baidu post. We believe such large-scale product integration will create significant synergy in content, infrastructure, and monetization. We also plan to leverage YY to accelerate the development of information and knowledge-centric live streaming on Baidu. This effort will not only improve user stickiness and vibrancy on our large internet platform, We believe live streaming has the potential to evolve beyond host tipping to become a major way for communities on Baidu to further divide and merchants to increase their user engagement and grow their social assets on the Baidu platform. User attention usually shifts towards interactive content. With the advent of 5G and augmented reality, To increase video effects, live streaming will be an integral component of future content development, and we are excited about this opportunity. With that, let me turn the call over to Herman to go through financial habits.
spk09: Thank you, Robin. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Baidu's fourth quarter 2020 call. All monetary amounts used in my discussion are in renminbi unless stated otherwise. Despite an unprecedented year, our business has returned to growth and our profits were solid in the fourth quarter. Baidu's online marketing is widely diversified, covering many industries in the Chinese economy, and we are benefiting from a rebound of the Chinese economy. Concurrently, our non-advertising revenue is growing rapidly, especially for the new AI business. Non-advertising revenue was up 52% in the fourth quarter, reaching 18% of Baidu core revenue. We recently conducted a TAM service exercise as part of our strategic planning process and found that the TAM for our non-advertising business, including internet value-added services, cloud services, and intelligent driving, before adding autonomous driving, was 10 times the size of our online marketing TAM. And to expect the TAGR to 2025 is three times that of our online marketing TAM. the potential for our non-advertising business is quite significant. For example, we recently signed a smart transportation project whose contract amount was more than half a quarter's worth of our auto online marketing revenue. There are over 100 cities in China with a population of over 1 million. When you consider a robot bus project recently experimenting, collecting 25 renminbi for each ride, if fare collection becomes feasible, we could see an increase in robot taxi demand which could drive our mass revenue under transportation cloud, the service component of fleet management. For fiscal 2020, Baidu core revenue reached $12.1 billion, and we spent 21% of research and development, which is a testament to our commitment to technology, especially in the area of research. Our consistent heavy investment in technology has made Baidu Paddle Paddle the number two deep learning framework in the world. Baidu open AI platform, the largest developer community of its kind among Chinese companies, and our AI patent portfolio, the largest in China. Our investment in AI runs the gamut of technology, developer communities, IP patents, AI chip design, and talent. As we began to commercialize AI at scale, the incremental revenue that we derive will be reinvested into product development, sales, and project delivery to further accelerate AI commercialization and strengthen our moat in our AI business. Unlike 2C business, 2B and 2G will require that we hire developers, sales, and engineering delivery personnel a few quarters ahead before they start contributing to revenue. At the same time, as our solutions become more widely adopted and we develop more toolkits, margins usually improve. We should also gain synergy coming from multiple businesses scaling, while leveraging off of Baidu Brain, our core AI engine. We are excited about our non-advertising opportunities from cloud services to smart transportation to intelligent driving, which includes self-driving services, intelligent EVs, robo-taxi fleet management, as well as non-advertising upside under our mobile ecosystem. Turning to financial highlights, total revenue for the fourth quarter reached $30.3 billion, or $4.6 billion, increasing 5% year-over-year. Our business improved mainly from Baidu Quora, which was up 6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, to $23.1 billion, or $3.5 billion, compared to down 13%, down 3%, and up 2% for Q1, Q2, and Q3, respectively. Let me give you more color on each component of Baidu Quora. Our AI cloud grew 67% year-over-year, reaching $2 billion on an annualized basis. Cloud growth benefited from enterprise customers coming from the Internet, media business, financial services, transportation, and healthcare sectors. Our intelligent driving and OGI revenue is also growing, but its near-term contribution may not be as apparent. Apollo Self-Driving, what we call ASD services, are booked on a multi-year basis, and we recognize revenue when an automaker's new vehicles are shipped with the installation of our ASD services. We have signed strategic partnership with 10 leading automakers for ASD, and we are taking orders for Autonomous Navigation Pilot, or AMP. Our mobile ecosystem, many of our ad verticals are growing, including healthcare, education, internet, retail, real estate, home furnishing, and auto. In-app advertising, the majority of Baidu core ad revenue continues to see double-digit growth, benefiting from the growth of search queries and CPM. Ad revenue is partially offset by Baidu Union, where we are prioritizing profitability over revenue growth. IT revenue reached $7.5 billion, down 1% year-over-year. IT subscribers reached 101.7 million in December, further strengthening its foundation to produce entertainment blockbuster originals. Non-GAAP operating income for Baidu and Baidu Core was $7.1 billion and $8 billion, or $1.2 billion US dollars, respectively. Non-GAAP operating profit was down 5% for Baidu Core, and non-GAAP operating margin for Baidu Core was 35%. Cost of revenue was $14.5 billion, down 6% year-over-year, primarily due to the decrease in content costs, traffic acquisition costs, bandwidth costs, and the amortization impairment of intangible assets, partially offset by an increase in cost of goods sold. SG&A and R&D together were $10.5 billion, up 24% year-over-year, primarily due to an increase in promotional and R&D personnel-related expenses. Adjusted EBITDA for Baidu and for Baidu Quora were $8.6 billion and $9.4 billion, or $1.4 billion U.S. dollars, respectively. Cash and short-term investments for Baidu and Baidu Core at the end of the year were $162.9 billion and $148.6 billion, or $22.8 billion U.S., respectively. Free cash flow for Baidu, excluding IHE, were $3.8 billion and $5.4 billion, or $827 million U.S., respectively. Baidu Core had approximately $3,200 million 32,800 full-time employees as of December 31, up 14% from last year. During the fourth quarter, we turned $600 million to shareholders, bringing the cumulative share repurchase in 2020 to $1.9 billion U.S. dollars, compared to $709 million in 2019. Turning to first quarter guidance. For the first quarter of 2021, Baidu expects revenue to be between $26 billion and $28.5 billion, representing a growth rate between 15% to 26% year-over-year, which assumes that Baidu core revenue will grow between 26% and 39% year-over-year. This guidance does not include any potential contribution from the acquisition of YY5. And the above forecast reflects our current and preliminary review, which is subject to substantial uncertainty. Before I turn the call back to the operator, let me summarize our fourth quarter results. We have made significant strides in preparing Baidu for the next legs of growth. Our heavy investment in technology has allowed us to build leading AI technology and put us in a strong position to pursue huge, fast-growing market opportunities such as cloud services, smart transportation, and intelligent driving, which includes self-driving services, intelligent electrical vehicles, and autonomous driving. The TAM for our non-advertising business, before including autonomous driving, is about 10x that of our online marketing business, and the CAGR is 3x faster. We get a glimpse of the impact of these opportunities with Q4 non-advertising revenues going 52% and already reaching 18% of our core revenues. We view Baidu Core's business on three revenue growth curves, mobile ecosystem, AI cloud, intelligent driving, and OGIs. with non-advertising value-added services in AI Cloud to boost our near-term revenue growth, and with intelligent driving and other growth initiatives to boost revenue growth further out. Over the past quarters, we discussed the aggregation of services on Baidu platform. The technology convergence trend that Robin talked about will allow Baidu families of apps to be equipped with unique services offered from us working directly with enterprises in the public sector. Robin gave an example in the smart transportation sector. We are also seeing this trend in the health sector, where we are working with hospitals to provide their services and doctors greater Internet presence. Some call this trend industrial Internet, where there is a deep integration with enterprises in the public sector of each industry and provide them with a turnkey solution to Internet presence. Our strength in building technology infrastructure puts us at an advantage in the current Internet environment, where synergy is generated from our offering of cloud, other growth initiatives, and mobile ecosystem concurrently. Our mobile ecosystem is benefiting from a rebound in the Chinese economy, and we stand to benefit from leveraging our large user base to grow our non-advertising revenue, such as fully integrating YY onto Baidu platforms. On capital allocation, our share repurchases in 2020 total $1.9 billion, which reflects the conviction that we have in the direction of our business. Over the past two decades, we have demonstrated a track record for long-term growth and strong profitability. The heavy investment that we are making to seize growth potential puts us on a path to further improve our long-term growth. Let me end by talking about our efforts in ESG. We recently released four series of ESG reports, clarifying our policy in anti-corruption, non-discrimination, privacy protection, data security, talent empowerment, and low-carbon emission commitment. More importantly, Baidu's effort in autonomous driving, including empowering EVs and mobile taxis, as well as smart transportation, decreased carbon dependency and enabled the improvement of traffic congestion and air quality through AI and cloud services. supporting green energy and green environment. We are pleased that Baidu's ESG ranking was raised twice last year as we improved the communication of our ESG efforts. With that, operator, let's open the call to questions.
spk06: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and white for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the pound or hash key. Participants are requested to restrict to one question at each time. Your first question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please ask your question.
spk04: Hi. Good morning. Good morning, Robin, Herman, and Jen. My question is related to your partnership with Geely. Can you share with us some colors on the expected timeline for this new EV to be released, and what Baidu wanted to achieve out of it? Will Baidu also continue to seek for partnership with other OEMs to co-produce other EVs? And just related to that, it seems like Geely is also working with multiple AD companies, and also working on developing their own ADAS. So how would you describe the partnership and your relationship with Geely? Thank you.
spk11: Hi, Alicia. This is Robin. Let me answer your question. Our partnership with Geely is based on the belief that end-to-end integration with hardware and software will provide the best experience for autonomous driving or smart EVs. In the past, we have developed a lot of very advanced autonomous driving technologies. We try to push this to integrate into our OEM customers, but most of the traditional OEMs tend to wait until someone else adopts the newest and latest technology. That's why we decide it's time for us to just to build a benchmark vehicle to show that how good the experience is. It also serves the purpose of a better and faster and stronger feedback loop so that we can improve our self-driving technology faster. Right now, the venture is progressing very well. We have a CEO on board. and we have decided on the brand of the new vehicle. As you know, it usually takes around three years from the beginning to the launch of a new EV model, and we try to do the same for this new venture. On the other hand, Apollo and Baidu Brain in general remains to be a very open platform. We will continue to work with other OEMs to provide the technology and the products to them whenever that is needed. We will serve them to our best efforts. In the past, without someone first trying, they tend to wait. Now we have a flagship one. We have a benchmark they can follow. I'm sure it will also help the revenue of the Apollo technology provider part of autonomous driving.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eddie Leung from Bank of America, Maryland. Please ask your question.
spk13: Good morning, guys. Just have a follow-up question on AI Cloud. I remember one of the key reasons behind AI Cloud is that it should have better margins than some of your competitors which are focused on some of the more infrastructure cloud services. So just wondering if you can offer some, not necessarily a very quantitative guidance, but some margin outlook for your AI cloud pieces, given some of your competitors already achieving a break-even status. Thank you.
spk09: Yeah. Hi, Eddie. Happy New Year. I'll take that. For our cloud, we have several pieces of business in our cloud. We talked about our enterprise cloud, which is SaaS, but we differentiate in the market with AI solutions such as PaaS and SaaS. And clearly, when we're able to do PaaS and SaaS, we see there's much more profitability to be made over SaaS. But what we have to recognize is that when you're going into a software space of a patch and ask, initially it might not be very profitable. For example, the AI solution that Robin talked about, when we did our first solution a couple years ago, that was actually a very, very poor margin because you're going into a new environment, you might have a good product, but you've got to spend a lot of effort to integrate with your existing legacy systems. So as you build that out, as you're selling to more customers and so forth, and you make your product more standardized, then the next few versions of this allows your profit margin to increase. So because we're growing so fast and we're trying a lot of new products, we would not expect profit margin at this stage to be very profitable. But when we look at our product lifecycle, such as the automated AI solution, customer solution call center, we can see that over time that that margin trends up. So to answer your question, I think on the one part on enterprise, cloud, and so forth, our margin is going to be a function of how much is passed and how much is passed and how much is asked. I think ads over time, because we're differentiating with staff and past, over time when that proportion seems to grow bigger and bigger, I think a profitable would be better, especially when the product matures. And then another big part of our cloud is, for example, a vertical cloud such as smart transportation. And again, that principle of product maturity, that principle of what makes a bad software and so forth, I think overall all of this would be very helpful. And just to answer your question, some of our competitors might be profitable and so forth. I think it really depends on the business that you want to be in. And unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of some of our peers where they can just allocate expenses to their other businesses and so forth because the infrastructure is the same. So I think profitability, I think one is how you do allocation of expenses. Another is are you focused more on software? Do you have a differentiation in the software sector such as our AI solutions and how mature your product is over the product life cycle? I think these are determinations of future profitability.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Piyush Mubai from Goldman Sachs. Please ask a question.
spk07: Thank you for taking my question, and congratulations, Robin, for a splendid quarter, a great outlook. Can I just go back to the intelligent EV company that you talked about, Robin? And you talked about a three year lead time to get a car to market under the name. So you selected a name, let's call it by new car for the time being. Why would it take three years for that to happen? First and second, when you launched that car and, um, I'm just trying to fish here also, what segments are you targeting and are you targeting a certain market share in this explosively growing market? Um, And we're trying to get a better sense of how this will evolve with time. And while this is happening, what happens to the revenue lines if we start to see accrue from the AMP in particular? So if you could give us a sense of what pricing could be like with products like the AMP that has just gone, I suspect, live right now. And I'll stop there.
spk11: Hi, Piyush. Yeah. As I mentioned, the reason we're doing this SmartEasy is that we want to bring the best out of our technology to the market. So the selling point, the main selling point of this new car model will be more on the software side or the software and hardware integration so that it has a better autonomous driving capability as well as better infotainment because of dual OS for auto, et cetera, et cetera. We will announce the price range or demographic target when we think it's mature enough for when we are really ready for that. But that means that you can count on that, that we will try to speed up the process to launch this new car as soon as we can. And it will be the best car on the market with the best autonomous driving technology and best infotainment for the smartest car. People generally call for this class as EV, but for us, the real point is not electric. The real point is intelligent, and we are best in terms of the intelligent driving, and we will fully leverage this kind of capabilities in the new car venture.
spk09: Yeah, and let me elaborate that, Apush, just to go a little bit deeper, give you more color on the meaning of intelligence. So when you look at EVs, right, there's several components. For example, there is the ASD, Apollo Self-Driving Services, that we talked about. That would be, you know, HD maps. That would be valet parking. That would be, you know, navigation pilots, stuff like that, right? And our model is different than most of EV manufacturers where we license OEMs. So we can spend that R&D, and then because our market is not just limited to how many cars we sell, it's open platform, so we sell to many OEMs. That's number one. Number two, in addition, being able to power the operating system of infotainments, that's very key because that requires a big ecosystem where you have a lot of content. So DoorS for Auto, as we mentioned in the We've already been involved with over 1 million cars in 2020. And again, that's a model we're working with several OEMs. So we have the edge in these two areas. In addition, we're doing autonomous driving so we can leverage that technology. And more important, you've got to realize we're doing this on an ecosystem basis. So on the one hand, it's making the car more intelligent from ASD, from connected vehicles, from autonomous driving. Another is the fact that we're doing a V2X with start transportation. Because a lot of the data is being gathered on our transportation cloud, whether it's on the road, whether it's through the maps, whether it's connected vehicles and so forth, we can understand the road better. So all of that data and that capability would then empower our EV. So two things. Number one is we think our EV can be more intelligent because we're doing other components and because R&D is centralized and it supports other manufacturers. And secondly, because of our ecosystem strategy, we're coming in from a transportation angle and also from the different components of
spk06: Alright, thank you. Our next question comes from James Lee from Mizuho. Please ask a question.
spk10: Great, thanks for taking my questions and congrats on an excellent quarter here. On the smart transportation side, can you guys maybe provide some framework on the government's plan in terms of building out across the country? Should we think about that build-out being maybe top 30 markets? And also maybe help us understand the bidding process for CD Contract a little bit? Do they choose multiple vendors and tech standards to do testing? And what is your key advantage compared to other operating systems? Is it your experience in autonomous driven miles or your ability to offer multiple services on the platform? And also lastly, maybe Herman, you can address this. Can you talk about the level of investments that is needed to make for smart transportation and also for autonomous driving over the next few years? And will you be breaking out the core advertising margins separately so we can also see the organic growth? Sorry for the long-winded question. Thanks.
spk11: Hi, James. In terms of smart transportation, we are the pioneer of the ACE concept. which means that we are the first company to really consider transportation as a whole using more software-centric solutions to improve the throughput, to connect the road with vehicles, and to help reduce accidents and reduce carbon emission. Yes, when we talk to the potential customers of all kinds of different tier cities, they will obviously compare and invite multiple vendors to bid on those kinds of projects. But in almost all cases, we are so much ahead of any competition essentially if they care more about the effectiveness of those smart transportation projects, we win. We're so much ahead because Apollo system is very open and we've invested in this area for many, many years and our AI capability provides a very solid foundation and we have been doing a lot of customization for smart transportation as Herman mentioned previously initially the margin could be low but when we repeat this kind of project city after city the margin improves and the overall gross margin for smart city smart transportation projects keep improving. It's much better than that the apps and CDN business offer, a lot of cloud services. On investment.
spk09: Yeah. So the good thing is when you look at our financial results, the amount that we're spending for autonomous driving and also for smart transportation is built into our model. So smart transportation is part of our AI cloud. So what you're seeing is already built in there. And you mentioned what does our margin look like for our core business. I suppose you're asking for mobile ecosystem. So for mobile ecosystem, our margin on that, on a non-GAAP basis, usually is between mid-40s to high 40s. And we've been pretty consistent in the last couple of years. Sometimes when revenue in a higher quarter We might reach a little bit over 50, but usually it's around that range. And we currently expect to be in that range right now. So you can see, as I talked about, the three curve growth, you know, mobile ecosystem we'll try to maintain within that range. And then for our new business and so forth, we look at it differently because that is more about are we funding it right to optimize growth for the next couple of years.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jerry Liu from UBS. Please ask your question.
spk12: Hi, thanks management. Happy New Year. So my question first is just to go back to the revenue guidance for the first quarter. Definitely a bit stronger than we even expected. So I wanted to look at what are some of the key growth drivers here. On the non-ad side, I would assume some of this is related to cloud and smart transportation. I'm wondering if there's any other key growth areas. And then secondarily, in the core advertising business, do we chalk this up to improving macro or are there some maybe different dynamics in terms of competition or products? Thank you.
spk09: Yeah, let me answer it in different components. You know, we talked about how non-advertising is now 80% of our revenue, and in Q4 it's growing robustly at 52%. We expect non-advertising to continue to outgrow our overall by-do, so meaning it's going to, because a lot of these are new businesses, it's going to be able to pull the weight. Smart transportation is part of cloud, and we talked about is over 60-some percent growth in Q4. So I think that with our strong offering and so forth, I expect this to continue into 2021. But do recognize that there is seasonality. For example, when you think about AI cloud, Q4 tends to be stronger than Q1, just how the budget works and so forth. But overall, I think non-advertising is going to be driving us not only in cloud, for example, in our other growth initiatives such as DuoOS and so forth, we think that these are all going to be engines of growth. You know, Piyush talked about earlier about, you know, our Apollo self-driving services. That, well, it's a small base, but that growth also helps. So it's all of these things. And then with regards to our advertising business, I think several things. I think number one is the economy is coming back, so the macro helps, certainly. But more importantly is Baidu APP. We talked about in-app services several times already. Because we've seen user behavior switching from browser into in-app services, because we have AI building blocks, we're the only one at this scale in China where the app was designed as a search app and it's open. It allows worldwide web search. It allows content from all different apps and from all different websites. Because of that and because the content and services are on our platform making that closed-loop native app experience the best, we think, in China, that the AI building blocks provides. We think that that helps user behavior, and because of query growth and so forth, that helps drive our revenue. And then also because it's native app, it's on a platform, obviously CPM helps. So you have traffic growth, you have CPM, and then also you have the macro as a backdrop helping you.
spk06: Thank you. Next question comes from Alex Yeo from JP Morgan. Please ask your question.
spk08: Hi, good morning management team. Thank you for taking my question and congratulations on a fantastic quarter. So I have a question regarding the YY integration. Robin, I think you mentioned that you guys plan to start integrating YY operation into your own content ecosystem in the coming quarters in your prepared remark. Can I confirm that the deal is still going ahead with the previously announced valuation despite of the money order report and the changing regulatory environment of live broadcasting business in China? And then I think you also mentioned new business opportunities will gradually unfold as you guys integrate YYZ live streaming operation capability into your content ecosystem. Can you talk us through some of the key addressable market and the business model that will potentially unfold with the integration process? And lastly, perhaps, Herman, can you talk about how should we think about the financial impact in the coming quarters as you guys consolidate business and integrate the operation into your content ecosystem? Thank you very much.
spk11: Alex, let me first answer the business model question, then I'll let Herman to answer the regulatory and financial guidance question. In terms of this model, we basically view live streaming as yet another new form of content and also new form of monetization. For content, Live streaming is comparable to text, images, and videos, including long and short form videos. Live streaming is just a new form of media. It serves the users best when you combine all kinds of different media forms and provide them the right form of media whenever necessary. And YY apparently provides a very vibrant and also mature ecosystem for live streaming content. Although they are more show-based content, the capability can be transformed into other forms of live streaming, including knowledge or e-commerce related live streaming. In terms of monetization, we view the Baidu platform as a whole mobile ecosystem with hundreds of millions of users log on to our platform on a daily basis, and we increasingly provide a more native app experience with a super majority of users logged in so that we know who they are and they can have a better experience going from here to there. Right now, the large user base is primarily monetized through advertising. This is sort of unusual when you compare with other large mobile ecosystems. They typically have more than 50% of their revenue coming from non-advertising. And for Baidu, in addition to advertising or online marketing, we can monetize our user base through live streaming, through subscription, through e-commerce, and many other forms of revenue stream. That's the rationale behind the YY acquisition.
spk09: Hey, Alex, can you help me with that question on muddy water report again? I didn't hear the whole thing.
spk08: Yeah, I mean, I just want to clarify the transaction is still going ahead despite of the muddy water report and the changing regulatory environment. And also, is the deal still going ahead with the previously announced evaluation?
spk09: Yeah, so you asked quite a mix of questions. With regards to the Muddy Water report, I think Joy has come out with a statement. As you guys know, they hire a global legal team, and they also hire a big four auditor, and they have made their own announcement. That's a Joy announcement, not a Baidu announcement. So I think looking at that would be the best. With regards to a regulatory environment, we are cognizant of the situation, and that's why we think that in order to navigate, as you know, you have a lot of experience looking at this. As you know, whenever there's a regulatory environment that you have to steer toward, it's more important to have a bigger leading player in China who have good relations with government, who knows how to do things correctly and so forth. and we needed an experienced team, and that gives us a better reason if we're going into a live streaming, we will buy a large experienced team. So this is more of an acquisition of a team rather than a particular product or just a business. It's the team talent that's very important. With regards to the contribution and so forth, currently we're moving ahead. What we're planning to integrate onto our platform, as Robin has said. And we're currently dealing, addressing with some conditions and procedures. And we still is on pace to do the closing, as we announced previously. We're moving ahead with this. And their revenue is usually between $2 billion, $2.5 billion a quarter. So when we can confirm all of this thing, that we think we will be able to come back with that revenue amount. And with regards to pricing and so forth, yes, our final agreement was the original price. We do have stipulations in the agreement to protect by due shareholders. As you mentioned, there was a muddy water report. the big four of the forensic team came in, did not see anything. The global attorney came in, did not see anything. But to protect us, we do have indemnification in there to get recovery just in case if something blows up in our hand as a result of situations and so forth. So did I answer your questions?
spk08: Well, thank you very much. Thank you all.
spk06: Thank you. Next question comes from Gregory Chow from Buckley's. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hi, management. Thanks for taking my question and happy Chinese New Year. So we know now Baidu has several different business lines, cloud, autonomous driving, mobile, smart devices. So in the daily operation, just want to know how the management team allocates your time spent and efforts among all the different segments and with your current management priority. And a quick follow-up on your ADS system. So you mentioned the partnership with some leading automakers. So in future, what's your best guesstimate of the pricing of the systems? Do you think the existing products, such as the Tesla FSD, is a good benchmark for pricing? Thank you.
spk11: Greg, in terms of time management, I would say roughly half of our time and resources are invested in the mobile ecosystem part and the other half in the AI cloud and intelligent driving and other growth areas. Because it's a relatively diversified portfolio of businesses, we try to set up more flexible mechanisms or incentive structures so that the team can be more independent and driven. For example, the smart EV company We have a strategic partnership with a very separate incentive structure for the team. And we recently raised money for our smart device company. So going forward, we will continue to do this. On the Apollo smart driving project, services, we will continue to provide technology at a very open and flexible manner. I talked about we offer HD maps, we offer AVP, we offer AMP, and potentially we offer other combinations of this kind of technology and services. The pricing range could differ based on the period of the contract and products we offer. It's growing very quickly and I would say it's still evolving very quickly.
spk09: Let me just add a little, Greg. I think Robin was very modest with regards to answering your talent question, you know, Robin talked about how he spends his time, but more importantly, as you may know, over the last two years, we have significantly strengthened our bank strength. So when you look at, for example, the leader of mobile ecosystem, Doe, you know, he's a PhD, and we not only have, you know, him from, you know, very young, joining us six, seven years ago, and also, if you look at over the last 12 months, we've been aggressively hiring good talents underneath Doe. You look at Dr. Wong, again, he's a PhD, and we have been helping him build his team underneath, too. And you look at, for example, our EV company, we're looking for a CEO who's out in the industry. So in addition to Robin's time and people from group management, we do spend a lot of time building talent, and I think that's why Robin is versatile in being able to manage all these businesses because a lot of it is on building that middle string and Baidu for each of the business groups so that they can run more autonomously, as Robin had mentioned, you know, through incentives and so forth.
spk06: Thank you. And next question comes from Natalie Wu from Hightown International. Please ask a question.
spk05: Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and I wish you a prosperous Chinese New Year, Robin, Herman, and Jen. So my question is regarding the autonomous driving. So Apollo is absolute leader for the third-party service providers in that area. But just curious, what are the closest competitors you can think of regarding ASD, RoboTaxi, Smart City, transportation projects, these three segments respectively? We'd love to hear management thoughts on that. Thank you.
spk11: You mentioned the competitors from ASD Smart Transportation. What's the third one?
spk05: The Smart City Transportation Project.
spk11: Yeah, sure. Yeah, in terms of ASD, I think the main competitors come from the traditional Tier 1 companies. But like I mentioned, we have unique advantages. For example, HD maps, basically the non-Chinese companies are not allowed to provide high definition maps. And for smart transportation projects, there are a number of more traditional smart transportation companies domestically Their business model is more like selling the hardware and complete the project and go away with it. But our model is more like an operator model. We would continue to optimize the throughput, reduce the traffic jam, and improve safety. for the overall transportation system as well as enable autonomous driving and connecting roads with vehicles to give them more guidance on the road information and help them to avoid any kind of a congestion. So, like I mentioned, There might be some other vendors that could compete in this area, but when you really compare about the effect of this kind of project, we are so much ahead. In terms of mass, there are a number of startups that have trial projects in scattered cities But it's in such an early stage, I think the adoption, well, pretty much driven by the maturity of the technology. And since we are well ahead in terms of technology development, I think we are only limited by our capability of penetrating the cities. improving the technology itself, not really limited by any competitors.
spk06: Thank you. Our last question for today comes from Tian Hou from TH Capital. Please ask a question.
spk02: Yeah, Herman, Robin, and Juan. Okay. I have two quick questions. One is related to your Apollo, automatic driving, a lot of questions have been asked. So my question is very short. So on the one hand, you know, all the modules you're selling to OEMs. On the other hand, you're going to start your own EV company. So under what kind of circumstances, some of your technology, you're going to just keep to yourself instead of, you know, licensing to others? So that's number one. Number two, related to the AI call center solution, so I'm very happy to see that operators start to purchase. And I wonder what is the potential for the AI call center solution? Who can be the potential customers? And what industries this call center can apply to? So that's the two questions. Thank you.
spk11: Yeah, for the first question, Apollo is an open platform. All of our technology are available to our customers. We will work with them to our best knowledge and best efforts. So anything that we use for ourselves is available to third party too. It's just because we have a better understanding of the technology itself we can better integrate software with hardware and use the feedback loop in a more timely fashion so that we can improve our technology faster. If you can compare this with Windows and Surface, Surface serves as a benchmark for laptops. pretty much like Apollo for third-party and for our own EV. On the AI solution for cost centers, it actually can be used in a lot of industries I mentioned, the airline industry, the telecom industry, the financial services industry. Wherever there's customer service needs, that our AI cost and solution can be applied to. It's actually being used in a number of different industries and we are going through phase one, phase two, phase three so that the experience continues to improve and the knowledge base for that certain sector or for that certain company can be viewed and the the system will become smarter and smarter.
spk06: All right, thank you. So ladies and gentlemen, with that, we conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.
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