Baidu, Inc. (
BIDU)
Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
July 23, 2009 8:00 p.m. ET
Executives
Victor Tseng – Director of Investor Relations
Yanhong Li - Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer
Jennifer Li - Chief Financial Officer
Haoyu Shen - Vice President of Business Operations
Peng Ye - Chief Operating Officer
Analysts
James Mitchell - Goldman Sachs
Jeffrey Lindsay - Sanford C. Bernstein
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.
James Lee - Sterne Agee Capital Markets
Eddie Leung - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
Richard Ji - Morgan Stanley
Dick Wei - JPMorgan
Scott Tong – Oppenheimer & Co.
Jason Brueschke - Citigroup
C. Ming Zhao - SIG
Eric Wen – MainFirst Securities Hong Kong Ltd.
James Sullivan
Stephen Ju - RBC Capital Markets
Hu Ban - HSBC
Presentation
Operator
Hello and thank you for standing by for Baidu''s second quarter 2009 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management’s prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today’s conference, Mr. Victor Tseng, Baidu''s Investor Relations Director. Please proceed, sir.
Victor Tseng
Hello, everyone and welcome to Baidu''s second quarter 2009 earnings conference call. Baidu''s earnings release was distributed earlier today and you can find a copy on our website, as well as on newswire services.
Today you will hear from Robin Li, Baidu''s Chief Executive Officer, and Jennifer Li, Baidu''s Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, Robin and Jennifer will be joined by Peng Ye, our Chief Operating Officer, and Haoyu Shen, Vice President of Business Operations, to answer your questions.
Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Baidu does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law.
As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast of this conference call will be available on Baidu''s corporate website at ir.baidu.com.
I will now turn the call over to Baidu''s CEO, Robin Li.
Yanhong Li
Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us today. The second quarter of 2009 was an exciting one for Baidu. Strong execution drove improvements in customer satisfaction and user experience and helped us realize revenue growth of more than 35% quarter on quarter.
During the second quarter, macroeconomic conditions remained challenging, even as we began to see some signs of recovery in the Chinese economy. That said, we are pleased that through relentless execution on both the user and customer fronts, we were able to drive a strong performance.
Chinese companies continue to realize the superior ROI offered by our P4P platform and are spending more with us. While SMEs remain our core revenue contributor, we are also seeing larger companies shifting marketing dollars more to our platform.
In addition to P4P solutions, we are actively engaged with these customers to explore various innovative marketing solutions to comprehensively fulfill their needs. For example, we most recently leveraged our popular Baidu Post Bar community product to place targeted ads for Nike, middle school community sites, and we explored arrangements to market promotions directly on Baidu''s homepage, such as the one we recently completed with Intel.
As you know, in April we officially launched the Baidu online marketing professional edition and enhanced the bidding platform for online marketing customers, also known as Phoenix Nest while still very much in its early stages, customer acceptance was very encouraging. Online marketers are appreciating the greater options in keyword choice and budgeting capabilities, as well as Phoenix Nest enhanced tools for measuring ROI.
