For First Time Ever, Baidu Sees Mobile Account For Over 10% of Revenues

We’ve seen China’s top search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), focusing on mobile a lot more in the past year. So how’s that working out? In Baidu’s latest financials for Q2 the company reveals that mobile revenues now make up “over 10 percent” of its total, which is a new high.

Baidu’s total revenues for Q2 rose 38.6 percent year-on-year to reach $1.23 billion. So mobile revenues are $123 million. Operating profit was up by only 3.2 percent in the past year to reach $473.1 million.

Founder and CEO Robin Li says in Baidu’s newest report:

We made solid progress in the second quarter, adding a record 58,000 online active customers. […] Our recent investments have further strengthened Baidu’s position in key strategic areas such as search, LBS, app distribution, and online video.

Lots of acquisitions, more R&D

Those last two points relate to Baidu’s acquisition of mobile app store 91 Wireless this week for a whopping $1.9 billion, and its buy-out of the PPS video-streaming service in May for $370 million.

Baidu also saw rising revenues from its online ads – $1.228 billion from about 468,000 active ad platform customers. Interestingly, Baidu’s R&D expenditure is way up this year, hitting $153.4 million.

But data from CNZZ shows that Baidu is losing search traffic to rival Qihoo, dropping 10 percent points in terms of market share in the past year.

In Baidu’s previous results for Q1 2013, the search giant pointed out that it had surpassed 100 million mobile search users. But there’s no update on that figure for the most recent quarter.

Baidu’s unaudited Q2 results are here.

(Editing by Anh-Minh Do)