On March 1, Baidu released its unaudited financial statements for the Q4 and full year ended December 31, 2021. In the fourth quarter, Baidu achieved revenue of 33.1 billion yuan, and the total revenue for the whole year reached 124.5 billion yuan, an increase of 16% year-on-year.
Notably, Baidu's non-advertising business has grown strongly over the past year, up 71% year-over-year. This shows that Baidu's long-invested ai new business represented by intelligent cloud and intelligent driving has begun to contribute new growth points to Baidu's revenue, and the second growth curve is slowly emerging.
From 2013 to now, Baidu autonomous driving has passed 9 years. The entire autonomous driving industry has long since left the laboratory and is moving towards large-scale mass production, and the commercialization process has gradually accelerated. As a pioneer in autonomous driving, Baidu is also trying different business models to monetize autonomous driving business.
To C: Radish Run 2025 or achieve bicycle profitability
Robotaxi is considered to be an important scenario for autonomous driving to land, and it is also an important way for autonomous driving to provide services to ordinary consumers. At last year's Baidu World Congress, Baidu upgraded the unmanned vehicle travel service platform, and Radish Run came into being.
Up to now, Radish Run has covered eight cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Changsha, Cangzhou and Yangquan.
Among them, on November 25 last year, Baidu obtained the commercial pilot service license issued by the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, officially opening robotaxi's charging model.
Since then, Radish Run has successively opened charging operations in Chongqing and Yangquan. According to the financial report, in the fourth quarter of last year, the number of manned orders for radish fast running was about 213,000, an increase of nearly double that of the previous quarter.
Robotaxi must have a scale effect to achieve profitability, according to Baidu's plan, Radish will run to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030.
JPMorgan Expects Baidu's Radish Run to reach an inflection point in 2022 and achieve bicycle profitability in 2025. JPMorgan chase suggested investors should start paying attention in 2022, which will help Baidu's long-term earnings and valuation revaluation.
Speaking of Baidu's To C business, it is necessary to mention the joint venture company Jidu Automobile jointly established by Baidu and Geely, and the day after the release of Baidu's financial report coincided with the first anniversary of the establishment of Jidu.
Last month, Jidu just completed a new round of "blood transfusion", Baidu and Geely jointly increased their holdings, and Jidu received $400 million in Series A financing. For the car industry, which is very expensive, Jidu still needs to attract bets from outside investors.
In terms of products, Jidu's first product concept car will be unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show next month, while the mass-produced model will be unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show in the second half of the year and officially mass-produced in 2023.
What kind of impact the products that Baidu has called "automotive robots" will bring to the industry and consumers are worth looking forward to.
To B: Become a supplier of intelligent driving for BYD
As another important business model of Baidu's autonomous driving business, Baidu's intelligent assisted driving solutions for automobile manufacturers have officially ushered in a large customer.
Previously, according to media reports, BYD chose Baidu as its intelligent driving supplier, and Baidu will provide BYD with ANP intelligent driving products and human-machine co-driving maps. In the conference call after the release of the financial report, Baidu officially confirmed the authenticity of the relevant news.
In fact, the cooperation between Baidu and BYD has a long history. As early as 2015, the two sides reached a cooperation agreement on unmanned driving. On the spring evening of CCTV in 2018, the Baidu unmanned vehicle based on BYD's electric vehicle drove on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, which really showed off in front of the national audience.
Baidu officially became a supplier of bydir intelligent driving, and the news said that the Baidu intelligent driving team has entered the field in advance to cooperate with BYD for development, and will soon achieve mass production of cooperative models. For both sides, this is a win-win situation, Baidu's ANP intelligent driving products have won a big buyer, the other party is the leader of domestic new energy vehicles; and BYD has made up for its shortcomings in automatic driving.
It should be noted, however, that BYD does not put eggs in one basket.
At the end of last year, BYD and Momenta established a joint venture, Dipai Zhixing, to create a high-level intelligent driving solution for the future. In addition, BYD has also invested in intelligent driving industry chain companies such as Horizon and Sagitar Juchuang. This may indicate to some extent that BYD still wants to take its soul into its own hands in the future.
Speaking of Baidu itself, compared with the difficulty of getting on the car of ANP products, Baidu's AVP autonomous parking products have won the favor of many customers and achieved mounting, including WM W6, GAC Aeon (2022 new models), and all of Great Wall Motors' products.
Robin Li also disclosed on the earnings call that according to internal estimates, Baidu's self-driving business ASD and in-vehicle infotainment system Xiaodu in-vehicle OS and other businesses reached 8 billion yuan by the end of last year.
To G: The number of cities with orders for intelligent transportation has increased to 35
Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li once pointed out three business models of Baidu's autonomous driving: Robotaxi, which builds cars and provides autonomous driving solutions for OEMs.
The former two are consumer-oriented, that is, To C; while the latter is OEM-oriented, that is, To B. In fact, Baidu autonomous driving also has a profitable model, that is, to G for the government.
While developing bicycle intelligence, Baidu has also been adhering to the use of vehicle-road collaboration schemes for autonomous driving, transferring some of the automatic driving functions to the road end, which can reduce costs on a large scale and accelerate the pace of commercialization of automatic driving.
Robin Li recently said that the use of vehicle-road collaborative solutions for autonomous driving is a technical route that Baidu adheres to and is optimistic about. According to Baidu's deduction, through vehicle-road collaboration, the accident rate of autonomous driving can be reduced by 99%.
Robin Li also judged that intelligent transportation based on vehicle-road coordination will be able to improve the traffic efficiency by 15%-30%, and within 5 years, China's first-tier cities will no longer need to limit purchases and restrict traffic; within 10 years, basically the congestion problem can be solved.
At present, the ACE intelligent transportation solution released by Baidu has landed in many cities across the country. The data shows that in 2021, the number of cities covered by Baidu ACE intelligent transportation signing tens of millions of orders has soared from 14 a year ago to 35.
Che Yun Summary:
Autonomous driving has opened the second half, and large-scale commercial operations have become the focus of the industry.
Baidu has made some achievements in the commercialization of autonomous driving with years of technology accumulation, huge ecosystem, and first-mover advantage in the layout of unmanned vehicle services, but there is still a long way to go from the real realization of profitability.