Baidu, Inc.

to your host for today's conference, Joanne Lin, BIDU's Director of Investor Relations.

Hello everyone and welcome to BIDU's fourth quarter and physical year 2024 earnings conference call. BIDU's earnings release was distributed earlier today and you can find a copy on our website as well as on Newswire services. On the call today we have Robin Lee, our co-founder and the serious role in charge of the mobile ecosystem group, Aminiji, Dou Shen, our EVP in charge of BIDU AI Cloud ECG, and Jackson Jinjiehe, our interim CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session. Please note that the discussion today will contain four looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the US Credit Security Mitigation Reform Act of 1995. Four looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results different materially from our current expectations. With detailed discussions of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report and other documents filed with ICC and Hong Kong Stock Exchange. BIDU does not undertake any obligation to update any four looking statements except as required under applicable law. Our earnings press release and this call include discussions of certain unaltered non-GAAP financial measures. Our press release contains a reconciliation of the unaltered non-GAAP to the unaltered most directly covered non-GAAP measures and is available on our website at .bidu.com. As you can hear, this conference is recorded. In addition, a podcast of this conference call will be available on BIDU's IR website. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Robian.

Hello everyone. BIDU core total revenue for the fourth quarter saw a slight year over year increase, reaching RMB 27.7 billion. Our AI Cloud bins demonstrated robust momentum with revenue growth accelerating to 26% year over year, offsetting the softness in our online marketing bins. The growth was primarily driven by broad market recognition of our AI capabilities in which we will continue to invest to make sure we stay at the forefront of this technology mega trend. 2024 marked a pivotal year as Gen.AI demonstrated strong market demand. We see this momentum reflected in the genuine value we created for our customers through our AI products and solutions, as well as AI Cloud services. This growth shows how enterprises have awakened to AI's transformative potential, catalyzing broader adoption across diverse scenarios while affirming the market's trust in BIDU's technical capabilities and AI expertise. As we continue to cement our leadership position as an AI innovator, our vision is gradually coming to fruition on multiple fronts. Our strategic AI investments are showing meaningful progress across our key businesses. Our Cloud bins demonstrated strengthening momentum towards the end of the year with both robust revenue growth and margin expansion. As we continued to rebuild the entire product portfolio of our mobile ecosystem with AI, most notably in BIDU search. Meanwhile, BIDU's autonomous ride-hailing service, Apollo Go, has proven the viability of its bins model, strengthening our confidence in pursuing global expansion and exploring asset-like bins models. Ernie has demonstrated industry-leading capabilities in instruction following and -the-art RAC technology that minimizes hallucination. This -in-class capabilities have driven widespread adoption across various scenarios, leading to significantly growing API costs. In December, Ernie handled approximately 1.65 billion API costs daily. We witnessed a particularly strong external demand with external API costs growing 178% quarter over quarter. We saw rapid growth across various business sectors such as education, e-commerce, entertainment, and recruitment. The robust growth in external API costs is driven by two reasons. First, businesses are finding enough value from integrating Ernie into their daily operations. Second, price matters. As the inference cost goes down, adoption goes up quite quickly. We recently made a significant strategic decision to open source our upcoming Ernie 4.5 series and make Ernie bot free for end users, which we believe will further expand market awareness of Ernie's capabilities and enable broader adoption across an increasing array of industries. Reflecting this growing market recognition, our AI cloud business delivered a robust performance. In Q4, we have partnered with leading enterprises across diverse sectors, helping them address specific operational challenges using our AI products and solutions. We collaborated with State-Grade Cooperation of China to develop a tailored AI solution based on Ernie and our mass platform, Qianfan. We have developed comprehensive AI solutions that permeate key operational processes, from power dispatching and equipment condition diagnosis to procurement, safety supervision, marketing, and office systems. Our solutions have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in boosting operational reliability. Impressed by these results, State-Grade has increased its spending on our AI cloud services, further deepening its collaboration with us. We also collaborated with Zhao Ping, a leading recruitment company to adopt Ke Yue's Ernie-powered outbound calling product for campus recruitment. Featuring highly human-like voice with natural conversational abilities, the product enables sophisticated multi-round interactions. Ernie's advanced capabilities ensured accurate gouging of candidates' interest in job opportunities while consistently keeping conversations on track. With this product, Zhao Ping achieved a 50% higher acceptance rate for job fair invitations and 70% lower labor costs. The growing market recognition and adoption reinforce our confidence, and we are optimistic that the growth momentum we witness today is just a start. As enterprises continue to discover novel ways to harness Ernie and our AI cloud potential, we foresee an ever-expanding horizon of possibilities unfolding before us. On the consumer-facing products, Baidu Wenku is a shining example. In Q4, Wenku's subscription revenue grew 21% year over year. In December, Wenku's monthly active user of AI-enabled features reached 94 million, almost a doubling quarter over quarter, making Wenku one of the world's largest AI products by the number of paying users. This quarter, we integrated Baidu Wenku with Baidu Drive, enhancing Wenku as an AI-powered creativity platform. This integration allows Wenku to combine personal cloud storage with AI-powered search and the document creation capabilities while enabling users to streamline their workflow from searching, accessing files, to creating and sharing all within a unified seamless platform. Furthermore, Wenku introduced a free canvas in January, which transforms content creation by enabling users to organize diverse formats, text, slides, audio, videos, and even website links on a unified canvas. Free Canvas also integrates with Wenku's existing AI capabilities, including AI Editor and AI-powered PowerPoint features, allowing users to access our full suite of AI editing tools and save or share their work in any desired format via Baidu Drive. Leveraging Ernie, Wenku is transforming into a next-generation intelligent creativity platform that redefines how users create, collaborate, and bring their ideas to life. Now, turning to Search, our largest consumer-facing product, which stands as another compelling testament to our AI transformation. Over the past several quarters, we have aggressively leveraged Ernie to transform Search. This has been a challenging but deeply meaningful journey, like pioneers crossing unfamiliar waters, we embraced the uncertainties that come with charting new territories. After extensive exploration, we have defined our path forward in leveraging the power of language models to present the multimedia content in Search results. Currently, 22% of all Search results pages contain AI-generated content. During the quarter, we mainly focus on redefining and enhancing the quality of our AI-generated Search results. Through Ernie's advanced capabilities in content generation, we can deliver unlimited high-quality content on demand, vastly expanding the depth and breadth of our Search results. This quarter, we expanded beyond text generation to generate diverse content formats, including short videos, notes, agents, digital humans, and live streaming. Through these more dynamic and varied content combinations, users can now discover a broader range of information that was previously inaccessible, presented in more engaging ways that aligned with evolving user preferences. As a result, we have achieved substantial improvements across three dimensions of our Search results in quality, quantity, and format diversity. Alongside this, we further enhanced the Search experience by optimizing the matching between queries and Search results. By analyzing the nature and intent of each query, the GenAI-enabled Search can determine the optimal content format and presentation style, such as delivering AI-generated short videos for how-to queries, generating comparative charts for analysis-focused searches, and dynamically organizing content sequences. This intelligent matching ensures that users receive not just the most relevant results, but in the most effective and -to-understand format. The effectiveness of this transformation is reflected in our improved user metrics. On Baidu Hub, users exposed to AI-generated Search results demonstrated higher engagement levels, conducted more search queries, and showed higher orientation rates and longer time spans. We are encouraged to see daily search queries per user increased by 2% -over-year in December. During our AI transformation of Search, we placed strong emphasis on agents, as we envision agents will become one of the most important forms of AI-native applications. Our agents have now transcended their initial chatbot origins through convergence with digital human technology, evolving into embodied intelligent entities with vivid visual presence, thanks to our industry-leading digital human technology. This represents a powerful innovation path we've pioneered, breaking new ground in how agents interact with users. Taking our newly introduced lawyer agents as an example, this embodied lawyer agent can transform legal expertise and industry know-how into engaging multi-modal content, featuring lawyers' actual appearance in live streaming and AI-generated short videos. Through this agent, we can efficiently generate high-quality, authoritative content as scale for Baidu Search and Feed, while pioneering innovative formats of content and user engagement. Moreover, these agents also create significant value for lawyers by helping them build personal brands, enhance engagement with potential clients, and improve lead conversion. Such agents are becoming a compelling new addition to Baidu's content ecosystem, creating new possibilities while further diversifying our content landscape. In the field of intelligent driving, our continued investments in AI are also propelling significant progress in our robot taxi business. In Q4, Apollo Go delivered remarkable results that reinforced our position as the world's top autonomous driving service provider. Our domestic operations continue to show robust momentum, and we have successfully validated our pioneering business model through years of operations, and established a path to profitability in the autonomous driving industry. Importantly, our unrelenting focus on safety remains at the core of our efforts as we expand our services. To date, Apollo Go feeds have accumulated more than 130 million autonomous kilometers with an outstanding safety record, underscoring our industry-leading standards. These operational and safety track record has paved the way for further scaling and operational enhancement. Building on this achievement, we are confident in expanding beyond mainland China as we enter the next phase of growth. In November 2024, Apollo Go secured permits to conduct testing on open roads in Hong Kong, making us the only company to receive robot taxi testing authorization in the region. Notably, Hong Kong represents our first entry into a right-hand drive, left-hand traffic market, showcasing our ability to adopt our autonomous driving technology to different traffic systems while maintaining rigorous safety standards. This achievement recognizes our deep expertise in autonomous driving operations as we are committed to expanding our footprint and bringing safe, reliable, and convenient autonomous driving services to more cities and regions worldwide. Now, let me review the key highlights for each business for the fourth quarter. AI Cloud revenue reached RMB 7.1 billion in Q4, delivering a strong -over-year increase of 26% with expanding non-gas operating margins. This quarter, we doubled the scale of our unified GPU cluster yet still achieved a 99% valid training time, a remarkable achievement enabled by our faster and more advanced network architecture. Our network has proven the capability to enable GPU across different geographical locations to work together seamlessly with minimized performance loss and automatically resolve the frequent network issues inherent in large-scale computing with almost unperceivable impact to our clients, demonstrating our ability to deliver peak performance at a massive scale. We continue to enhance Qianfan, our math platform, which improves model and app development experience for our customers and partners. Our platform features the early family of models and offers access to a selection of high-quality models across the globe, with DeepSeq being one of our latest additions. We offer post-training, SFP, data labeling, and preparation for all models hosted on Qianfan, enabling us to deliver the most suitable models and tools to enterprise clients at all scales. The increasing market recognition of our AI expertise continues to drive momentum in our enterprise client pipeline. We have established deep partnerships with leading enterprises, including Xiaomi and GKE. Further highlighting the growing trust in Baidu AI Cloud. Besides, we are increasingly becoming the preferred choice for mid-tier businesses. This reflects the strengthening competitiveness of our AI infrastructure and marks a healthy evolution and diversification of our customer portfolio. For our mobile ecosystem, our current priority is to further enhance the user experience and refine our product features. We will explore monetization opportunities after our GEN-AI enabled search product features and framework become sufficiently refined. Additionally, we continue to see agents emerging as a promising avenue for monetization, which represents meaningful growth potential for our advertising business. In December, over 27,000 advertisers have been generating ad spending through early agents on a daily basis. This rapid growth in healthcare, legal, education, and B2B sectors. This rapid adoption stems from agents' unique ability to address their specific pain points. Agents can quickly master complex, non-standardized service portfolios, a task that traditionally requires lengthy training for human customer service people, while efficiently qualifying leads from standard customer inquiries through intelligent multi-round interactions. For intelligent driving in Q4, Apollo Go provided a process of dealing 1.1 million rides to the public nationwide, representing a -over-year growth of 36%. In January, the cumulative rides provided to the public exceeded 9 million. Also, we reached another milestone recently with the successful transition to 100% fully-coverage operations nationwide. Building on this strong momentum and with an unwavering commitment to safety as our top priority, we expect to see even faster growth in our ride volumes, with a significant acceleration anticipated in 2025 as we further scale our operations. We continue to improve the technology as we scale up, combined with our validated business model and initial steps in expanding global footprints. We believe we are well positioned to create substantial value and reshape the future of mobility. Driven by our deep-rooted belief in technology and conviction in AI long-term value creation potential, we will continue to invest to make sure we stand at the forefront of cutting-edge AI technology and deploy that to all our products across the board. With that, let me turn the call over to Jackson to go through the financial results.

Thank you, Robin. Now, let me walk through the details of fourth quarter and the four-year 2024 financial results. Total revenues in the fourth quarter will arm to be $34.1 billion, decreasing 2% -over-year. Total revenues for the four-year 2024 will arm to be $133.1 billion, decreasing 1% -over-year. By-Doo Call's Q4 revenues will arm $27.7 billion, increasing 1% -over-year. In 2024, By-Doo Call generated RMB $104.7 billion in revenue, increasing 1% -over-year. By-Doo Call's online marketing revenue decreased 7% -over-year to RMB $17.9 billion in Q4, accounting for 65% of By-Doo Call's total revenues. By-Doo Call online marketing revenue decreased by 3% -over-year in 2024. By-Doo Call's non-online marketing revenue was RMB $9.8 billion, or 18% -over-year. For the four-year 2024, non-online marketing business increased 12% -over-year. The increase in non-online marketing business was mainly driven by AI Cloud business. Revenue from ITE was RMB $6.6 billion in Q4, decreasing 14% -over-year. Revenue from ITE was RMB $29.2 billion in 2024, decreasing 8% -over-year. Cost of revenues was RMB $18 billion in Q4, increasing 3% -over-year, primarily due to an increase in trust acquisition costs, costs related to AI Cloud business, and a one-time write-down of inventories, partially offset by a decrease in personnel-related expenses and accounting costs. Cost of revenues was RMB $66.1 billion in 2024, increasing 2% -over-year, primarily due to an increase in trust acquisition costs, bandwidth costs, and server-custom fees, partially offset by a decrease in personnel-related expenses and accounting costs. Operating expenses were RMB $12.2 billion in Q4, which remained flat compared to the same period last year, primarily due to an increase in expected credit losses, server depreciation expenses, and server custody fees, which support GEN-AI's research and development input and the channel spending and the promotional marketing expenses, partially offset by a decrease in personnel-related expenses. RMB $561 million of the increase in expected credit losses was pertaining to a one-time extruder. Operating expenses were RMB $45.8 billion in 2024, decreasing 4% -over-year, primarily due to a decrease in personnel-related expenses. Operating income was RMB $3.9 billion in Q4, compared to RMB $5.4 billion for the same period last year. Baidu Core operating income was RMB $3.6 billion, and Baidu Core operating margin was 13% Q4, compared to RMB $7.7 billion and 70% for the same period last year. The decrease due to a one-time loss of RMB $1 billion, including accrual of credit losses, write-down of inventories, and other. Operating income was RMB $21.3 billion in 2024. Baidu Core operating income was RMB $19.5 billion, and the Baidu Core operating margin was 19% in 2024. Non-GAAP operating income was RMB $5 billion in Q4. Non-GAAP Baidu Core operating income was RMB $4.6 billion, and Non-GAAP Baidu Core operating margin was 17% in Q4. Non-GAAP operating income was RMB $26.2 billion in 2024. Non-GAAP Baidu Core operating income was RMB $23.9 billion, and Non-GAAP Baidu Core operating margin was 23% in 2024. In Q4, total other income net was RMB $2.7 billion, compared to total other loss net of RMB $2.5 billion for the same period last year. Many due to increase in net foreign exchange gain arising from exchange rate fluctuation between RMB and the US dollar, and a decrease in pickup losses from equity matter investment, which modified certain terms of its preferred shares and result in significant loss pickup in 2023. Income tax expense was RMB $1.6 billion. In 2024, total other income net was RMB $7.4 billion, increasing 120% year over year, primarily due to a decrease in pickup losses. Income tax expense was RMB $4.4 billion. In Q4, net income attributable to Baidu was RMB $5.2 billion, and diluted earnings per ADS was RMB $14.26. Net income attributable to Baidu Core was RMB $5.3 billion, and non-margin for Baidu Core was 19%. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu was RMB $6.7 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS was RMB $19.19. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu Core was RMB $7.7 billion, and non-GAAP net margin for Baidu was 24%. In 2024, net income to Baidu was RMB $23.8 billion, and diluted earnings per ADS was RMB $35.91. Net income attributable to Baidu Core was RMB $23.4 billion, and net margin for Baidu Core was 22%. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu was RMB $27 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS was RMB $76.85. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu Core was RMB $26.3 billion, and non-GAAP net margin for Baidu Core was 25%. As of December 31, 2024, cash, cash equivalent, restricted cash, and short-term investments were RMB $139.1 billion, and cash, cash equivalent, restricted cash, and short-term investments, excluding ITE, were RMB $134.7 billion. Free cash flow was RMB $13.1 billion, and free cash flow, excluding ITE, was RMB $11.1 billion in 2024. We defined net cash position as cash and cash equivalent plus total restricted cash, deposits, and others, that's total loans, convertible senior loans, and notes payable. As of December 31, 2024, net cash position for Baidu was RMB $170.5 billion. Baidu Core had approximately 31,000 employees as of December 31, 2024. With that, operator, let's now open the call to questions.

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 wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. Your first question comes from Alicia Yap with Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Okay, thank you. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. My questions is on the latest hot topic. So we have seen DeepSeq gaining a lot of attention lately, and Baidu recent announcement for the open sourcing the upcoming Ernie 4.5 series and also making Ernie Bot for free. So could management share with us the strategic thinking behind this move? And also how do we view the current competitive landscape of the foundation's models? How does Baidu plan to stay ahead of this evolving market? Thank you.

Hi, Alicia. Let me answer your questions. The genuine foundation model market is still nascent, but you know, moving at a very fast pace. The DeepSeq success story will certainly accelerate the adoption rate of foundation models. As foundation models become more accessible and affordable, I believe we are entering a truly transformative phase. We are seeing an explosion of new AI applications and use cases that will open up incredible opportunities and push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. One thing we learned from DeepSeq is that open sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption. When the model is open source, people naturally want to try it out of curiosity, which helps drive broader adoption. Ernie 4.5 will be our best models ever, and we would like to have our users and customers try them out more easily than before. So our decision to open source Ernie 4.5 series is also backed by our deep confidence in our technology leadership. This conviction stems from our decades-long commitment to R&D investment, our continuous technological innovation, and our unique position as one of the few companies worldwide with full-stack AI capabilities. Ernie has already demonstrated a strong market traction with daily API costs surging from 50 million to 1.65 billion in just one year. So through open sourcing, we believe more developers and users will recognize Ernie's true value, driving even broader adoption and expanding its impact across more scenarios. Similarly, making Ernie bot free will enable more users to compare our foundation models with other models on an -to-Apple basis because they don't charge. Last time we had a major upgrade of Ernie was in October 2023, so it's a long time ago. So stay tuned for Ernie 4.5 in the next couple of months. Having said that, I want to emphasize one crucial point. No matter open source or closed source, foundation models become truly valuable only when they can effectively address real-world problems at scale. We have been committed to an application-driven approach in continuously iterating Ernie. With this mindset, since launching, we have been using Ernie to renovate our products while serving enterprise customers. Internally, we've leveraged Ernie to successfully transform our consumer-facing products like Baidu Search and Baidu Wanku. Externally, through our mass platform, Tianfan, we are enhancing the model and application development experience for enterprise clients. Ernie's industry-leading capabilities in instruction following and -the-art retrieval-augmented generation technology minimizes hallucination. We have enabled wide adoption across various scenarios. Tianfan's comprehensive tool chain allows our customers to customize any model for their own application scenarios. Going forward, we plan to accelerate Ernie's iteration based on the performance improvement and cost-cutting potential. We will continue evolving it in areas with the greatest potential for real-world impact. We are excited about the new chapter of AI development and we look forward to seeing AI technology bring more groundbreaking applications that have lasting value for the society. Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Lincoln Kong from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Benjamin, for taking my question. So my question is about a search business. So following recent quarters of search revamp, so how should we think about the future adjustment or changes? So what's the current mix of the GNI result and what's our target mix? And also, as the AI integration continue to deepen, could you share more color around the user metrics? Given that AI chatbots such as DeepSeek and DoeBao are also offering search capability, so how do you view the competitiveness or the competition dynamics between by-do search and those AI chatbots? Thank you.

Hi, Lincoln. Let me answer questions. And currently, around 22% of all search results pages have contained the AI generative contents. However, there is much more going on behind the scenes. They have fundamentally transformed search, making it more powerful and efficient than ever before. And as Stannis Robinson said in the previous remarks, with earning, we have expanding the search beyond text and links to offer diverse content formats, including short videos, live streaming, agents, nodes, and short plays. And these different formats can be dynamically combined to create personalized search experiences. As we continue to transform search, we also are developing the capabilities which allow for the deep personalizations, adapting to each user's habits and preferences. And our efforts have led to better user results. And in January, we can see that among monthly active users who conduct a search on By-Do App, 83% engage with the generative AI content. What's even more encouraging is that in December, the search queries per user on the By-Do App grew by 2% year over year. And we focus on continuous improvement in user experiences, expanding the AI's role as we see increasing positive user engagements. Building on this, let me share a small case of how earning agents can create values for our advertisers. During this past Chinese New Year holiday, while many small and medium enterprises are closed for one week, and customer demand in certain industries actually peak. Our earning agents effectively bridge this gap. For example, hearing aid companies so increase inquiries as a family reuniting and child or elderly parents have needs. But their customers, but their own customer service team actually work away because they're on holiday. Through the earning agents, we have a company to effectively identify and qualify the highly relevant sales leads, enabling them to efficiently follow up and serve their customers seamlessly, even with a reduced end user holiday. And regarding your question about AI chatbots and search, we believe that we are still in the very early stage of the AI revolution driven by the financial models. Whether it's AI native chatbots like Deepsea or our AI driven products, these kinds of efforts, and these all represent different ways to explore AI potential. As the leader in China's search market with hundreds of millions of users, we maintain agility and holistic market view by embracing the best innovations and incorporating the truly innovative AI features. We continue to pioneer AI transformations enhancing the search experiences for our massive user base. Also search by its nature is deeply rooted in language and text outstanding, which aligns perfectly with the large language model capabilities. These position us well to lead in the AI in power search transformations. We believe search is evolving into an integrated platform that's go beyond the AI chatbots. And one that not only provides the smart answers, but also guides users through their entire journey from finding answers to providing in-depth analysis to completing tasks and ultimately to delivering the comprehensive services and solutions. Our AI chatbot represent an important but early phase in AI application development. The killer today has not yet emerged. And for us the key is to maintain this rapid and determined pace of the AI transformation focusing on discovering what users truly need and want from the next generation of search. Thank you, Lincoln.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Alex Yao from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question. So could you comment on core ads growth outlook for first quarter 25 and full year 2025? What are the macro assumptions you made underlying these online ads outlook as the advertising business truly bottom out in 4Q24 and started to recover? Lastly, what are the potential opportunities for monetizing AI search and what is the expected timing? Thank you.

Thanks Alex. This is Julius, let me ask you a question. Yes, we are seeing the different kinds of the similar policies rolling out in the past few months and like the monetary using physical simulators and trading policies. And while we believe that these measures will eventually will benefit the economy and they need some time to float through. Given that our advertising business is highly correlated with the small and medium enterprises who are particularly sensitive to macro conditions plus these persistently challenging competitive landscape and we haven't really seen any improvements in Q4 yet. Despite the near term pressures, our efforts to transform search with foundation models are progressing steadily and we believe that these AI transformations will continue to enhance the user experiences and create new opportunities. This quarter we further deepen the AI transformation of search and we are seeing encouraging improvements in user metrics as we talked about in the prepared remarks and we believe this will help drive revenue growth and open up new monetization opportunities in the Logan 10. Also we haven't monetized our research results at scale yet which is around 22% of the total queries. Once our AI powered search features are sufficiently refined we will move forward with monetization. With higher quality user products we are seeing opportunities for future growth. Based on these factors we think that we are reaching the final point of our advertisement businesses where expect our app businesses to gradually improve with the first half of the year performing better than Q4 and the second half of the year showing further improvement over the first half. Thank you Alex.

Thank you, your next question comes from Gary Yu from Morgan Stanley, please go ahead.

Thank you, we look forward to the opportunity. So my question is regarding AI cloud, given the strong growth of your AI cloud business this quarter can we expect a continue positive projection going into 2025 and both in terms of revenue and also profitability. What are the main drivers behind this momentum and additionally could management share your outlook on the AI cloud market in 2025? How should we approach enterprise cloud demand and what incremental opportunities does AI bring to the segment, thank you.

Thank you Gary for your question. So as Robin mentioned, our AI cloud revenue growth accelerated to 26% year over year in Q4 contributing to a full year revenue growth of 17% in 2024. Notably, a Gini AI related revenue nearly tripled year over year in 2024. So this growth was fueled by rising demand for Ernie and our AI infrastructure and scoring the market's strong recognition of our technology coding leadership. So as a result, we have successfully attracted a diverse customer base and build a robust pipeline of opportunities. So for the AI infrastructure, we have established partnerships across diverse sectors including the internet, automotive, smart devices, manufacturing, energy, finance, utilities and lots of AI GC startups. Our customer base continues to grow healthily with strong gains among both top tier and mid tier customers, demonstrating our expanding market share in China's cloud market. On the mass platform, Qianfan, it provides comprehensive foundation models with industry leading price and performance. So we offer the Ernie family of models from flagship to lightweight variants, designed to meet diverse needs. And besides Ernie, we also provide access to a wide range of high quality third party foundation models, including Deep6 V3 and R1 models. Thanks to our full stack AI capabilities and end to end optimization, we can ensure optimal performance and stability for any models hosted on our platform while maintaining highly competitive pricing. So in addition to that, Qianfan provides a full set of tools for fine tuning models and building AI native apps so that our customers can easily work out solutions catering for their own specific needs. So in terms of the AI cloud market, we believe it will grow rapidly in 2025. On one hand, during the recent Chinese New Year holiday, large language models became a widely discussed topic. This not only further increased public awareness of foundation models, but also encouraged more people to think deeply about how to leverage them to improve their own businesses. On the other hand, we are confident that the performance of foundation models will continue to improve while the cost will steadily decline. Surely this will further lower the barrier to utilize these models. So as a result, we believe more enterprises will integrate foundation models into every aspect of their business operations, from R&D to production and to service, which will drive exclusive growth in API costs. Thereafter, we anticipate increased spending on FIDU AI cloud as we have observed a clear trend in the past that consumers who adopted foundation models through API costs on our Qianfan mass platform also tended to increase their spending on our AI cloud services. On the profit side, our non-gap operating margin continued to expand year over year in Q4 as we focused on high value opportunities that align with our strategic priorities which drives sustainable robust growth. So looking into 2025, we are confident that our AI cloud revenue growth will maintain strong momentum while continuing to generate positive operating profit. Thank you,

Gary. Thank you. Your next question comes from Zhang Wei from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi, management, good evening. Thank you for taking my question. I want to ask about our margin trend. So given the near-term headwinds in core ads and the increasing mix of cloud revenue, how should we think about the core margin levels in the first quarter and also for your 2025? Is there any room to further optimize our operating efficiency? And also, are there any investment plans for the full year that we should be aware of? Thank you.

Thank you, Wei, for your question. This is Jackson. So despite the near-term pressure, so we remain optimistic that our strategic AI investment will deliver more sustainable impact. So we stay focused on improving resilience across all aspects of our business operations and see encouraging progress across our businesses. First, for our online marketing business, we expect our advertising revenue to gradually improve, driven by our plan to monetize our AI-generated search results at scale and also our readiness to capture growth opportunities when the macro improves. Secondly, so for our AI cloud business, it has already demonstrated robust growth with continued margin improvement, driven by our growing market presence and the competitive advantage in our unique self-developed four-layer AI architecture and the four-step AI capabilities. So we remain confident in maintaining this strong momentum going forward. Third, for our entire driving business, particularly robot taxi, Apple Go, we remain focused on lowering losses with better operational efficiency and improved UE. We are also exploring innovative operational models, including asset-led models. As you asked, for the investments and optimization in 2025, we will maintain optimal resource allocation to high growth opportunities while staying aligned with our long-term strategy. Our investments will continue to focus on initiatives that offer both tremendous future opportunities and strong ROI potential, including further advancing earnings capabilities, deepening the AI transformation of search, enhancing our AI cloud offerings and expanding our autonomous driving initiatives. As we move forward with these initiatives, we remain committed to enhancing operational efficiency and fostering initiatives across this group to maximize the impact of these strategic investments. Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Miranda Zhang from Bank of America Superiorities. Please go ahead.

Good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my question. My question is about the robot taxi business. Can management provide updates to the progress of the robot taxi business heading into 2025? What are the targets for fleet size, unit economies and value proposition for our robot taxi business? What do you think the industry is approaching? Are we reaching an inflection point? And what's your view about the competition dynamics? As we are seeing that China's robot taxi competitors are leveraging ecosystem strategies with automakers and also ride-hailing platforms, so wondering what is Baidu's approach to compete and scale? Thank you.

Yeah, this is Robin. We've invested in autonomous driving technology for over a decade. We have turned our big vision into reality. Through Apollo Go, we established ourselves as a leading global player in autonomous driving technology. We operate in one of the most challenging environments globally. You know, China's traffic conditions are among the world's most complex due to its massive population, diverse road conditions, dynamic traffic scenarios, and complicated urban layouts. The price for ride-hailing in China, it's about like 1 7th of that in the US. So our successful operation here demonstrates our exceptional technological and operational capabilities. We designed the RT6, our sixth generation autonomous vehicle from the ground up. It is the most cost-effective global taxi vehicle the world has ever seen. With this strength, we've successfully validated our BINZ model and laid a strong foundation for further scaling and global expansion. In Q4, Apollo Go provided approximately 1.1 million rides nationwide. That's 36% increase year over year. And in January, the cumulative rides provided to the public exceeded 9 million. Furthermore, as I mentioned, we've achieved 100% fully driverless operations in China, which means that we don't have any safety drivers on the vehicles anymore. So this is a new industry benchmark, and it reinforces our leadership in this area. As I mentioned earlier, in November of last year, Apollo Go got the green light to start open road testing in Hong Kong. And this is an important step because Hong Kong is our first right-hand drive and left-hand traffic market. It shows our ability to adapt our autonomous driving technology to different traffic systems. Opening doors for expansion into other markets with similar driving setups.

This

year will be a paramount year for our expansion. We expect to grow our fleet size and ride volumes faster than ever. As we push forward, we're also actively seeking cooperation opportunities. We have identified a variety of potential partners, including mobility service providers, local taxi companies, third-party fleet operators, and other potential partners. This asset-line approach will allow us to scale up efficiently while maintaining flexibility. By working with a diverse range of partners, we aim to strengthen our position in the market and bring autonomous driving to even more people. Looking at the broader market, as I mentioned in our last earnings call, since the market is still in its infancy, competition actually helps accelerate market development and foster a more friendly innovation regulatory environment. In this growing market, our mission remains clear, delivering safer, more convenient, and more comfortable mobility experience for more users. Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Thomas Chung from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions. Looking into 2025, what will be by-do strategic focus for business investments? Specifically, how will resources be allocated across search, autonomous driving, cloud services, and foundation models? Additionally, what is management's outlook on full-year 2025 capital expenditures as well as shareholder's returns? Thank you.

Thank you, Thomas. This is Jackson. So as we evaluate our capital allocation options in 2025, our approach is guided by the following strategic considerations. We will continue to invest in advancing our AI capabilities as a long-term strategic priority. So with that, we will further deepen the AI transformation across our product portfolio, particularly search. So in AI cloud, we aim to drive the adoption of our AI infrastructure. Our mass platform Tianfan and the earning among enterprise customers meeting their growing demand for AI products and solutions, as well as AI cloud services. In internal driving, we are focusing on scaling domestic operations, exploring innovative operational models, and expanding our international presence while ensuring disciplined AI management and effective loss control. For CAPEX, two key priorities drive our decisions. So strengthening our technology leadership and accelerating the adoption of our AI products and AI cloud services across different sectors. As you asked for shareholder returns, we repurchased over US $1 billion since the beginning of 2024, which is significantly higher than our total buybacks in 2023. So in total, we have repurchased US $1.7 billion on our $5 billion purchases program, which runs through December 2025. So going forward, we plan to accelerate our buyback program as part of our ongoing efforts to return value to our shareholders for their enduring trust and support. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have for questions. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. Thank you for your time.