What happened
Shares of Baidu (BIDU 0.84%) have popped today, up by 12% as of 11:30 a.m. EST, after the Chinese search specialist reported third-quarter earnings. The results topped Wall Street's forecasts.
So what
Revenue in the third quarter came in at 28.1 billion yuan ($3.93 billion), ahead of the 27.5 billion yuan that analysts were expecting. That all translated into adjusted earnings per American depositary share (ADS) of $1.76, crushing the consensus estimate of $1.16 per ADS in adjusted profits. Adjusted operating income was $516 million, and Baidu's adjusted operating margin expanded on a sequential basis.
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Baidu App now has 189 million daily active users (DAUs), up 25% from a year ago. Video-streaming service iQiyi, which is majority-owned by Baidu, saw subscribers jump 31% to 105.8 million. Baidu's voice assistant DuerOS saw monthly voice queries soar to 4.2 billion, as the company continues to grow within the smart speaker market. Baidu is the No. 1 smart speaker vendor in China, which is now the world's largest smart speaker market.
Now what
In a statement, CEO Robin Li said, "Our focus to combine search and feed and expand Baidu App's content and services offerings is improving user experience and drawing publishers and service providers to place more content and services on Baidu's hosted platform, which in turn draws more users."
In terms of guidance, the company said revenue in the fourth quarter should be in the range of 27.1 billion to 28.7 billion yuan ($3.78 billion to $4.02 billion). That's in line with the $3.9 billion that investors are expecting.
