Following the market close on August 20th, Baidu released its second quarter 2024 financial results, reporting quarterly revenue of 33.931 billion yuan, down 4% year-over-year, and operating profit of 5.944 billion yuan, declining 45% year-over-year.
Among major business segments, Baidu Core revenue reached 26.3 billion yuan, down 2% year-over-year. Online marketing revenue was 16.2 billion yuan, decreasing 15% year-over-year, while non-online marketing revenue reached 10 billion yuan, up 34% year-over-year. This marks the first time non-online marketing revenue exceeded 10 billion yuan, primarily driven by intelligent cloud business growth.
In the second quarter, Baidu's AI Intelligent Cloud revenue grew 27% year-over-year to 6.5 billion yuan. For the first half of 2024, AI Intelligent Cloud revenue increased 34% year-over-year, significantly higher than the low double-digit growth rate in the first half of 2024.
During the earnings call, Baidu Group Executive Vice President Shen Dou noted that enterprise cloud growth consistently outpaced overall AI Intelligent Cloud business growth, serving as the primary growth driver for cloud business. Specifically, subscription revenue accounted for more than half of total enterprise cloud revenue and continued steady growth in the second quarter with over 50% year-over-year increase, mainly driven by strong momentum in AI infrastructure subscriptions.
In both the financial report and earnings call, Baidu extensively discussed "AI reconstruction" achievements. In search business, traditional hyperlink search results are gradually being replaced by structured, intelligent, and multimodal-first AI answers. In July, AI-generated content's share of mobile search result pages rapidly increased from 35% in April to 64%. In June, Baidu App monthly active users reached 735 million, up 5% year-over-year, attributed to Baidu's early testing of AI search commercialization in the second quarter.
However, during the call, Baidu CFO He Haijian emphasized: "Large-scale commercialization has not yet begun, so in the short term, we expect profit margins to face significant pressure. But from a long-term perspective, this initiative will position us more favorably for stronger growth."
Baidu also previewed multiple future product plans. Baidu founder Li Yanhong announced during the second quarter earnings call: "Currently, we are developing the next-generation flagship version of Ernie (Wenxin large model). This generation of Wenxin model has improvements in many key functions, and once preparation is complete, we will immediately release it to everyone."