Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 21, 2023 7:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Juan Lin - Director, Investor Relations

Robin Li - Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Rong Luo - Chief Financial Officer

Dou Shen - Executive Vice President

Conference Call Participants

Alicia Yap - Citi

Alex Yao - JPMorgan

Miranda Zhuang - Bank of America

Gary Yu - Morgan Stanley

Wei Xiong - UBS

Lincoln Kong - Goldman Sachs

James Lee - Mizuho

Thomas Chong - Jefferies

Operator

Hello and thank you for standing by for Baidu’s Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today’s conference, Juan Lin, Baidu’s Director of Investor Relations.

Juan Lin

Hello, everyone and welcome to Baidu’s third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Baidu’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 Li, our Co-Founder and CEO; Rong Luo, our CFO; and Dou Shen, our EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group, ACG. After our prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session.

Please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities 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. For detailed discussions of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report and other documents filed with SEC and Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Baidu does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under auditable law. Our earnings press release and this call include discussions of certain unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Our press release contains a reconciliation of unaudited non-GAAP measures to the unaudited most directly comparable GAAP measures available on our IR website at ir.baidu.com. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast of this conference call will be available on Baidu’s IR website.

I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Robin.

Robin Li

Hello, everyone. Baidu Core delivered solid revenues, profit and cash flow in Q3 despite navigating in a challenging macro climate for both our online marketing business and AI cloud business. I am proud that our team managed to strengthen operational efficiency and maintain stable margins, a full-scale reinvention of our product portfolio with ERNIE and ERNIE Bot. Today, I would like to share an update on the new opportunities that ERNIE and ERNIE Bot have opened up for us. After that, I will discuss some key highlights of each of our businesses.