There is a saying that the world underestimates Baidu. Wall Street still regards Baidu as a search company, but Baidu has long since faded away from the simple operation of "Baidu click". With the continuous deepening of artificial intelligence, Baidu has become a member of the first echelon of driverless cars in the world and is the only one in China. .
Not only foreign countries, but also our memory of Baidu still remains in the slogan "Baidu Click". Because of this sentence, Baidu has become the Chinese website with the largest search volume in the world.
In the full-year data for 2019, the cumulative number of users on Baidu's entire platform exceeded 1 billion, the search volume market share exceeded 72%, and the daily distributed information traffic exceeded 15 billion. It is no exaggeration that Baidu supports China. The king of search engines. However, for a long time, Baidu's P/E ratio, which has been compared with Alibaba and Tencent, was only 19.32 times, about half of Alibaba and Tencent. In everyone's perception, "Baidu is still just a search engine."
But in fact, Baidu is trying hard to play the role of accumulating gains through hard work and courage.
Baidu Apollo, as an important achievement of artificial intelligence, has transformed Baidu into a true technology company. Riding on the "wind of autonomous driving", Baidu has become the first echelon in the global autonomous driving field. This It took six years.
01 Opening the door to the automotive world
Almost like Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei, Baidu will eventually “invade” the automotive manufacturing industry, but the key to opening the door to autonomous driving is manufacturing car. It’s just that compared to their car-machine system software development, Baidu is much more advanced.
On December 18, it was reported on the Internet that Baidu may join forces with WM Motor to build a car. The two parties have now entered into cooperation discussions. Baidu and WM Motor have said the same "no comment." However, Baidu insiders revealed that Baidu will release a new chip on the 22nd of this month, which will be installed on the new Weimar model.
Since Baidu officially established its "Apollo" self-driving subsidiary in 2017, among the many cooperating car companies (cooperating with Geely, Volkswagen, Toyota and Ford, etc.) , Baidu seems to be particularly fond of WM, not only investing 1 billion yuan in it, but also forming the "strongest intelligent alliance in car manufacturing" to jointly build smart cars; this year, WM completed a 10 billion yuan D round of investment Among them, Baidu's name is also on the list of co-investors. This new chip is also based on the "autonomous parking" technology achievement Valet Parking autonomous parking solution jointly developed by WM Motor and Baidu at the end of 2019. A new attempt.
Due to the keen trend in the automobile industry, the marriage between Baidu and WM seems to have been confirmed. After all, judging from the closeness between Baidu and WM, it is only a matter of time before they "get together".
Based on the news that Baidu and WM Motor are cooperating to build cars, Baidu’s stock price has risen sharply for 6 consecutive trading days. As of December 16, Eastern Time, Baidu's stock price rose by more than 7% intraday, with the stock price exceeding US$200. The ARK Fund managed by Catherine Wood (female version of Buffett) has also continued to increase its positions in Baidu. Currently, ARK's funds hold 983,000 shares of Baidu, worth over US$180 million. At the same time, foreign investment bank Arete also gave Baidu a "buy" rating with a target price of US$250.
Under the tide of the industry, Baidu has achieved a new high in market value in the past two years, approaching US$65 billion.
The formula of technology company + new power enterprise also makes Baidu more in line with the current industry trends. It is not directly involved in the car manufacturing process, but chooses to become a "car porter" and will play a role from 2013 onwards. Regarding the advantages of the accumulated autonomous driving system, WM Motor's display stage is used to display the functions of autonomous driving and artificial intelligence to the greatest extent.
As Baidu’s stock price continues to rise, the voices of the capital behind it are getting louder and louder. Some industry analysts even suggested, “If Tesla is the benchmark for electric vehicles, Nvidia is the stimulus for the chip market. In the field of autonomous driving, Baidu will act as the main force in stimulating the Chinese market from chips, data, algorithms, and solutions. On the current road ahead, Baidu's participation in car manufacturing is an opportunity of the times. It is also an appointment in the current industry.
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It’s not clear whether such an evaluation is excessive praise, but it is undoubtedly a slap in the face for Wall Street investors who once only thought that Baidu was a search engine company.
Earlier, the autonomous driving competitiveness list released by Navigant Research showed that the four companies in the first tier are Waymo, Cruise, Baidu and Ford Autonomous Vehicies. Only Baidu in China is on the list, and as the world's first. Baidu, which is mass-producing an autonomous driving computing platform, is not keeping a high profile at this time.
02 Prove the technology with technology
Baidu is determined to do a good job in autonomous driving. /p>
If the successful cooperation with WM can be regarded as "a bet between like-minded friends", then WM is a stepping stone to help it open the car door.
From now on. Since the establishment of the autonomous driving division in 2015 and the upgrade of smart cars to Baidu's L3 division in 2016, Baidu has increased its R&D expenses by more than 25 times. It is also one of the few BAT-level giants that will include "R&D investment" as a key mention in its financial reports. company.
Once embarked on the road of self-driving, apart from being costly and laborious, it will not bring any profit returns in the short term. However, Baidu has continued to burn huge amounts of money so far. R&D expenses are continuing to expand by more than 10% per year. In the first three quarters of 2020, Baidu's R&D expenses were 4.2 billion, 4.8 billion, and 4.69 billion yuan respectively.
From domestic sources. From driving on closed roads to the first public driverless license, Baidu slowly changed its label from "search engine" to "self-driving".
In 2019, Among the top five AI companies in the world ranked by Harvard Business Review, Baidu is the only Chinese company on the list, and it is also the first among Chinese companies in the number of global AI patent applications.
Finally, Baidu has found the correct positioning after going through adjustments like "a strong man breaking his wrist", and Robin Li, a low-key and tenacious leader, is also trying to prove to the world what he said when he gave a speech at Cambridge University. At that time, Robin Li believed that the future The coming era will be divided into three forms: "The first is the PC Internet era; the second is the mobile Internet era; and the third is the artificial intelligence era. ”
What Baidu has to do is to take advantage of its search engine and use technology to prove that Baidu’s bet on the autonomous driving industry is not wrong.
However, what Robin Li said The "spring" we want is not yet ripe.
For the autonomous driving industry, it is just a seedling now, and the current era is in the stage of explosive growth of mobile Internet, Douyin and Kuaishou. , short videos, live broadcasts, and new trends in the content community are constantly emerging, but Baidu does not have many advantages in these. Baidu’s biggest profit points are search engines and products under the intelligent cloud, which are between mobile Internet and artificial intelligence interaction. In a sense, Baidu is in a position of neither embarrassment nor embarrassment.
Choosing autonomous driving and artificial intelligence is undoubtedly a lonely road. No one can predict the "spring" of autonomous driving. "Where is it? At this moment, Baidu, before it has a comprehensive grasp, can only decisively choose its comrades and take advantage. This has also become the key interpretation of the upcoming cooperation between Baidu and Weimar. At least on the road ahead of autonomous driving, Baidu You are not alone. Compared with the enthusiasm of Alibaba and Huawei, Baidu, which is relatively lagging behind, does not have much time to think.
In Baidu’s Q3 financial report letter in 2020, Baidu once again made clear its goals and set Baijiahao. , small programs and hosted pages as the pillars of the mobile ecosystem and Baidu Smart Cloud AI solutions are placed at the same height; at the same time, Robin Li also emphasized that "we must fight for the future with a zero-return entrepreneurial mentality." Baidu has a long way to go, money continues to burn, and projects continue to be developed.
03 market pursuit battle
Judging from the current trend of capital pursuing Baidu, Baidu has released relevant information. The progress of the Apollo project, including mid-term and long-term goals, is very conducive to improving Baidu's current situation in the capital market and increasing its price-earnings ratio.
On December 8, the second Baidu Apollo Ecological Conference was held in Guangzhou.
At the conference, Baidu not only comprehensively demonstrated Apollo's latest progress in the fields of intelligent transportation, smart cars and autonomous driving, but also released ANP, a Lego-style smart car intelligent solution.
This pilot assist system (ANP) relies on Apollo Lite, the only L4 pure visual autonomous driving technology in China, to create L4 autonomous driving technology that is dimensionally reduced and released into the assisted driving field. Different from industry solutions that only support high-speed and urban loop lines, ANP can be used on urban roads, penetrate into more complex road sections, and realize full-scenario autonomous driving mass production solutions.
This Baidu Apollo Ecological Conference is interpreted as a bellwether event for "the real start of domestic autonomous driving". Baidu will also assume a more arduous responsibility for the times than developing autonomous driving projects. The L4 level autonomous driving that is constantly being supported has allowed Baidu to go ahead. However, the L3 and L4 levels advertised by major car companies are still "stifled" in the end. In the dilemma of being unable to drive on the road without a license plate, only those who have the "gold medal to avoid death" Only Baidu is qualified to create more. This is the necessity of its existence and one of the reasons why capital is gradually optimistic about it.
According to Baidu’s plan, in the next 3-5 years, 1 million units of Apollo smart driving products are expected to be installed in mass production.
Just one day before the press conference, Apollo also obtained Beijing’s autonomous driving test permit. The autonomous driving test mileage in Beijing and Changsha has exceeded 52,000 kilometers.
In the latest news, Baidu and Shouqi Car-hailing will become the first online car-hailing platform in China to open autonomous driving services. Unlike the previous Didi Chuxing that required an appointment to experience, Shouqi’s autonomous driving experience does not require By making a reservation, anyone can experience self-driving services through Shouqi’s ride-hailing service.
The market pursuit battle has begun, and Baidu must move forward and occupy an advantageous position. According to a McKinsey research report, China will be the world's largest autonomous driving market in the future. By 2030, total sales of autonomous vehicles will reach US$230 billion, and the amount of travel service orders based on autonomous driving may reach US$260 billion.
Undoubtedly, Baidu is betting on this long-term battle.
In 2030, ten years are enough for the country to change hands, but Baidu is slowly expanding its ambitions, from Beijing, Cangzhou, Chongqing, to any city with automatic license issuance, it will be among them. This kind of project relies on quantity and data to win, and only by practicing it can you taste the secrets. With the acceleration of new infrastructure in the 5G era, the domestic autonomous driving industry is in good shape, and the autonomous driving industry is bound to usher in a golden period of development. Baidu wants to be the king, and looking at it now, the right time, place and people are moving closer to it.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.