智能云维持双位数增长，AI 贡献智能云业务总收入的11%。2024Q3，百度核心非营销收入为77 亿元，同比+12%。其中，智能云收入为50 亿元，同比+11%。Overview: Total revenue decreased slightly compared to last year. Adjusted net profit to mother reached 5.9 billion yuan. After adjustment, net profit margin to mother was stable. With 2024Q3, Baidu Group achieved total revenue of 33.5 billion yuan, -3% year-on-year. Baidu's core revenue was 26.5 billion yuan, which is basically the same as the same period last year. iQiyi's revenue was 7.2 billion yuan, -10% compared with the same period last year.
With 2024Q3, Baidu Group achieved adjusted net profit of 5.9 billion yuan, or -19% year-on-year. Adjusted net profit margin of 18% to mother. Among them, Baidu Core achieved an adjusted net profit of 5.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year ratio of -18%, and an adjusted net profit margin of 21% to mother.
Baidu's core advertising revenue fell 5%, 20% of search results were achieved by generative AI (18% in August), and 70% of monthly active users used generative search. Baidu's core online marketing revenue was 18.8 billion yuan, up -5% year over year. Apart from macroeconomic pressure and declining demand in real estate and investment promotion industries, there are also competitive reasons. AI and big language models (LLM) brought incremental revenue to the advertising system. Ad agencies' response accuracy and intent recognition ability improved this quarter, and approximately 20,000 advertisers generated ad spend every day through them.
Intelligent clouds maintained double-digit growth, and AI contributed 11% of total smart cloud business revenue. 2024Q3, Baidu's core non-marketing revenue was 7.7 billion yuan, +12% year over year. Among them, smart cloud revenue was 5 billion yuan, +11% year-on-year.
AI revenue accounted for 11% in the third quarter, which continued to increase compared to 9% in 24Q2.
AI model inference costs are continuously optimized to promote the growth of users of the original product. ERNIE's daily processing API cost is about 1.5 billion, a significant increase from 0.6 billion in August. Currently, the average number of tokens per day exceeds 1.7 trillion.
In the third quarter, the proportion of driverless operations nationwide exceeded 70%, and in October, 100% driverless operation was achieved in Chongqing. Apollo Go provided approximately 988,000 rides to the public in the third quarter, an increase of 20% over the previous year. In October, the cumulative number of rides offered to the public exceeded 8 million.
Investment advice: We are optimistic about the potential driving effect of AI technology on search advertising and smart cloud businesses, and maintain profit forecasts. We expect to achieve adjusted net profit of 28.6/31/33.2 billion yuan in 2024-2026, maintaining an superior market rating.
Risk warning: the risk that the growth rate of the advertising market will fall short of expectations due to the macroeconomic downturn; the risk that the actual application of AI models will not be as effective as expected; the risk that the autonomous driving business will develop more slowly than expected; policy risks, etc.
