(Reuters) – Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), China’s largest search engine, reported a net loss of 885 million yuan ($131 million) for the fiscal quarter ended March 31. This came as China’s economy went down and a pandemic came back.
A year ago, it made a profit of 25.65 billion yuan, or 73.76 yuan per ADS, a year ago.
IBES data from Refinitiv showed that sales went up 1% to 28.41 billion yuan. This was the slowest growth in six quarters, but it was better than the average analyst estimate of 27.82 billion.
Robin Li, the founder, and CEO of Baidu, said in a statement that the recent resurgence of COVID-19 in China has been bad for business since mid-March. He also said that problems related to the virus will continue to put pressure on Baidu’s operations in the near future.
Baidu Core’s sales went up by 4% to $20.48 billion. Its AI projects mostly provide services and products for online marketing.
In the statement, Chief Financial Officer Luo Rong said that sales from Baidu AI Cloud, a public cloud service that is one of the fastest-growing parts of the company, went up by 45 percent.
The company started out as a search engine tool, but in recent years it has added cloud services, robotaxis, and self-driving cars as competition for its core search platform and advertising business has grown.
Last month, Baidu got permission to put robotaxis on open Chinese roads for the first time without a person in the driver’s seat.
(1 US dollar = 6.7320 Chinese yuan renminbi)
