Baidu’s Singles’ Day Advertising Revenue Surges 120% during China’s Online Shopping Spree

BEIJING, Nov. 15, 2017 -- Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, today announced that this year’s Singles’ Day advertising revenue increased by 120% compared to last year, buoyed by record-breaking sales by Chinese consumers during the biggest annual shopping festival in China on November 11.

“The active participation of merchants from a larger variety of industries such as beauty, food and beverage, education and housekeeping services during Singles’ Day was a win-win situation for Baidu, the merchants, consumers and e-commerce platforms,” said Alex Cheng, Baidu’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Baidu Search.

In advance of this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, Baidu prepared by connecting to customers’ databases in order to better understand online users’ needs. Learning users’ preferences ahead of the day, the Baidu platform was able to better fulfill their needs through data matching. The significant growth in advertising revenue was also bolstered by the increased use of display advertising.

“As a media platform for online marketing customers, the most important thing for Baidu is matching online users with our customer base. Online users can find the exact services and products they need on Baidu, while customers can reach out to highly targeted sets of users. Baidu is a hugely valuable platform as we can fulfill users’ needs at the same time as supporting the business success of our marketing customers,” he added.

As China’s largest search engine, Baidu has a significant competitive advantage in online traffic. Baidu’s technology strengths are also an advantage for marketing strategies as the company is able to use its big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to provide accurately targeted ads.

Baidu's strategic pillars are to strengthen its mobile foundation and lead in AI. Baidu is leveraging its AI technology to strengthen its core products including search – enabling a more natural search experience via voice and images as inputs, increasing the coverage of rich content, and creating more accurate and detailed user profiling.

Singles’ Day takes place on November 11 every year and is the biggest shopping festival in China with Chinese consumers spending billions of dollars buying online. Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Inc. announced that this year’s Singles’ Day gross merchandise volume reached a record RMB168.2 billion (USD25 billion), while another e-commerce platform JD.com reported RMB127.1 billion (USD19 billion) in GMV.

About Baidu
Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Baidu aims to make a complicated world simpler for users and enterprises through technology. Baidu’s ADSs trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “BIDU.” Currently, ten ADSs represent one Class A ordinary share.

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