Baidu posts first loss since IPO listing in 2005

[bill]

Baidu risks losing China 'Big Three' status after bad quarter [asia.nikkei.com]

China's top search engine Baidu has unveiled its first loss in 14 years, amid regulatory headwinds, a softer Chinese economy and the departure of top talent.

Known as the "Google of China," Nasdaq-listed Baidu lost 327 million yuan ($49 million) in the January-March quarter, according to its filing on Thursday night U.S. time. It is the company's first net loss since listing in 2005.

[TorontoBoy]

This is very surprising, seeing that they have a near 90% monopoly on search in China, and it is illegal to use a VPN. This is the very definition of "captive market" or monopoly. For Chinese content Baidu is the best, but there's a lot of commercial debris that you need to sift through for each search before you get to real content. It is even worse than Google.

I wonder what they are spending all their money on?

[jmccormac]

I've noticed a lot of a fake content websites in the web usage surveys I run on the gTLDs. These are Chinese language sites but with content ripped from genuine sites, blog posts and SERPs. The usage %s for some of the Chinese new gTLDs are bad and a lot of the gTLDs are full of gambling and adult entertainment landers rather than developed sites. There's even commercial Chinese software available to automate the production of these fake content sites and unless you knew exactly what you were looking for in terms of code and structure, these sites are good enough to fool the average user.

Regards...jmcc

[iamlost]

Here's the transcript of the Baidu first quarter earnings call [fool.com]. Pretty easy read to draw one's own conclusions. And if one compares information with that of competitors in various endeavours...