Baidu auto investment map is out, how far is the car dream from being realized?

Among Chinese Internet players, Baidu is one of the earliest to become famous, and it is also an early company to invest in mergers and acquisitions.

Songguo Finance learned that according to CyberCar news, enterprise investigation data shows that since 2007, Baidu has completed a total of 378 investment incidents and 313 investment projects. Among them, it reached its peak in 2018, and a total of 78 investments were completed throughout the year.

However, Baidu's investment in the automotive sector is not early, starting around 2013. As of February 2022, Baidu has made a total of 67 investments in automotive-related fields, including chips, mobility platforms, and autonomous driving systems.

In the jianghu of BAT, Baidu's investment history is not very long. Baidu's layout in the automotive field presents different characteristics according to different leaders. In 2004, Baidu initially entered the investment field; in 2017, with the addition of Liu Wei and Li Xinhui, Baidu's investment territory was slowly opened, forming a "trident" composed of Baidu Venture Capital, Baidu Capital and Baidu Investment and Mergers and Acquisitions Department.

It can be seen that in recent years, Baidu's investment layout has generally had a clearer goal, expecting to be able to have business associations with invested enterprises, and paying more and more attention to smart cars.

From Wang Jin to Lu Qi to Li Zhenyu, with the change of the person in charge of Baidu's autonomous driving business, its business layout and investment logic are constantly changing, and the overall direction is moving towards a clearer, more meticulous and more landing direction.

It can be seen that the layout of Baidu's automotive field is serving "open source" and ecology, although the ensuing market is like an inflated balloon, squeezing the space imagined by entrepreneurs, but compared with the previous virtual heat, 2021 is undoubtedly a year for artificial intelligence to land. What Baidu is doing is to strive to popularize AI and quickly land. Obviously, Baidu's ambitions and bets on AI are probably greater than any VC/PE institution in China.