Nowadays, when it comes to the Internet, bat is rarely mentioned again.
As one of the three giants, B is obviously inferior to A and T, and even the rapid rise of Internet companies such as Byte and JD.com, Baidu's growth is far behind.
In 2021, Tencent's revenue will exceed 500 billion yuan (estimated), and Alibaba's revenue will be 650 billion yuan.
What about Baidu?
124.5 billion.
This is not a volume at all.
Why?
Wheels of the times.
Those who follow us will prosper and those who oppose us will perish.
Since the door of the Internet was opened in the 1990s, China's Internet has developed to the third generation.
The first generation is the PC Internet, which is the era when developed countries in Europe and the United States are absolutely dominant.
Compared with the use of computers by households in Europe and the United States, the popularity of computers in China is not too high, and those who can use computers to access the Internet belong to a small number of elites (in a sense, those who can go to Internet cafes are also elites).
BAT controlled the three most important entrances in this era: search, social, and online shopping.
Of course, behind BAT, the computer industry chain has also begun to grow. Lenovo, Inspur, Founder and other enterprises began to start from assembly and imitation, and a large number of domestic computer brands took root at this time.
Because of the lack of sufficient market volume, China's own chip companies have not grown up in this era. This is the era of Intel and AMD.
The second generation is the mobile Internet, which is the era when China came to the fore.
Chinese have not experienced the use of household computers, directly past this stage, ushered in the era of a smart phone in everyone's hand. Apple has created a smart phone market, and the follow-up of domestic brands such as Meizu, Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, vivo, etc., has made Chinese companies the absolute hegemon of the global mobile phone market.
The market determines technology, and China's huge mobile phone market brings massive output value, allowing Chinese companies to stand up.
Chinese enterprises began to participate in standards from 3G, 4G influenced standards, and 5G dominated standards.
China's mobile phone industry chain is not satisfied with assembly and imitation, on the one hand, it has innovated in the field of design, and on the other hand, it has begun to develop its own chips.
Intel's transformation of mobile chips has been full of resistance, and eventually the chip king of the mobile Internet era has become ARM. Compared with Intel's design and production package, ARM's intellectual property system is much simpler, such as Huawei getting a permanent license for the entire version of ARM.
Tencent and Alibaba have successfully transformed into the mobile Internet era after suffering pains. In this transformation, because of the different mobile scenarios, the search requirements and PC side are very different, and Baidu is lagging behind.
The third generation of the Internet has arrived, and this is the era led by China.
It is the Internet of Everything.
If you pay attention, you will find that almost all the home appliances that can be bought in recent years, whether it is air-conditioned TVs or washing machines, support the use of APP interconnection, and even rice cookers can notify you that your rice is now mature.
This means that all home appliances have a complete set of IoT chip system, behind which is an immeasurable industrial chain market. Since the energy consumption requirements of IoT devices on chips are not high, the process is no longer a constraint on chip technology.
For example, Tesla's 14nm "brick" large chip is also used very well.
Among them, one of the segments with the largest market space is the Internet of Vehicles (autonomous driving).
Who's working in this market?
Baidu.
Baidu racked its brains and did not find its own position in the era of mobile Internet, from takeaway to video to red packets, without exception tepid.
Instead of reversing the wheels of the times, it is better to plunge into the next era.
In 2017, Baidu released the Apollo platform to fully embrace autonomous driving.
On November 25, 2021, Baidu Apollo received the first order for autonomous driving charges in China, which marked that autonomous driving is ushering in the "second half" - the commercial operation stage.
1. Baidu's 2021 annual report
On March 1, 2022, Baidu released its 2021 annual report (unaudited).
In 2021, Baidu's revenue was 124.5 billion yuan, an increase of 16% year-on-year, and its net profit was 10.2 billion yuan, down more than half from the same period last year. The core R&D expenditure was 22.1 billion yuan, accounting for 23% of Baidu's core revenue.
Source: Flush iFind, Cartography: Poetry and Starry Sky
Combined with the data of the 2020 annual report, it is found that there are two main reasons for Baidu's increase in revenue and profit, one is to increase investment in research and development, from 19.5 billion to 24.5 billion; the other is to increase marketing and promotion, and sales expenses have increased from 18 billion to 24.7 billion.
Behind the numbers, Baidu R & D personnel and marketers continue to expand. At a time when many Internet giants continue to expose the news of layoffs, Baidu is still quietly adding people, which is really rare, and it also reflects that Baidu's business is expanding.
Of course, if you only look at financial data, Baidu's business from search engines (mainly advertising) is still the top priority, and the annual revenue of the sector is 95.2 billion yuan, accounting for 76%, with a growth rate of 12%.
This number needs to be looked at dialectically, on the one hand, under the existing Internet business model, Baidu's core business remains basically unchanged, indicating that although there is a new retail model impact such as short video and live broadcasting, in terms of search engines, traditional enterprises still maintain steady delivery; on the other hand, with the post-90s and post-00s entering the society and becoming the mainstream of consumers, the traditional search engine gradually lacks increments.
Baidu's innovative business is the future.
Second, the innovative business exceeded expectations
In Baidu's product line, autonomous driving and AI cloud computing are innovative businesses, and the revenue of this part reached 21.2 billion yuan, an increase of 71% year-on-year.
Due to the particularity of Alibaba Cloud, almost none of the domestic cloud computing brands can play in the field of general cloud.
Baidu Cloud has another way, starting from the individual user's network disk, and then engaging in enterprise network disk and enterprise cloud computing market.
In addition, Baidu's AI platform has also achieved good results. By the end of 2021, the AI Flying Propeller Developer Community has gathered 4.06 million developers, served 157,000 enterprises, and developers have created 476,000 models on the Flying Propeller.
Baidu is proud of the radish run.
Radish Run is an autonomous driving commercialization project incubated by Baidu Apollo platform, and in the fourth quarter of 2021, Baidu Radish Run order volume was about 213,000, nearly doubling from the previous quarter.
As of February 2022, Radish Run covers 8 cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Changsha, Cangzhou and Yangquan; among them, Beijing, Chongqing and Yangquan have all started official fee operations.
There are two scenarios in which autonomous driving can be quickly profitable, one is for the last mile of the logistics industry, and the second is for the taxi industry.
Especially in the pilot areas that have realized vehicle-road coordination, where the route is relatively fixed, the taxi business based on automatic driving is far simpler than the realization of driverless cars by private cars.
"Coincidentally", the first person to do the self-driving rental business was Baidu's old rival, Google.
In 2009, Google's Waymo project was founded. In 2020, Waymo has 365 vehicles, with about 1,000-2,000 weekly orders, 12,000-24,000 orders per quarter; in August 2021, its fleet reached 615 vehicles, with quarterly orders of 2.02-40,300 orders, with an annual order volume of about 160,000.
After the commercial application of Radish Run, it has achieved a far leading position for Waymo.
It can be expected that in 2022, the radish run will achieve a big step beyond.
This is not the transcendence that Baidu itself can achieve, behind it is the result of the joint action of policies and regulations to support the industrial chain.
Google's self-driving technology is still based on bicycle simulator human driving.
Baidu's self-driving technology is realized through the smart city of "infrastructure madness". Vehicle-road collaboration is safer and more reliable than sensors, and urban planning has developed a dedicated road for autonomous driving, transformed vehicle-road collaboration, met the commercial operation needs of Baidu and other autonomous driving companies, and then achieved overall technological transcendence in developed countries.
The American science fiction novel Heinlein wrote a science fiction novel that envisioned an automated road city called "The Road Rolls Forward". The first to realize this dream is Chinese.
It may not be long before bat is mentioned again.