Baidu announced that its quarterly revenue fell by 7%, reporting weak numbers that it attributed to a slump in its ad business again. According to the Chinese firm, total sales came in at 31.17 billion yuan ($4.38 billion), a figure pulled from data reviewed by LSEG.
Baidu also mentioned that its US-listed shares were “little changed” in early trading as the market tried to process the slowdown. Baidu attributed the hit to China’s economic problems. The company noted that demand in the country stayed soft because the property sector remained in crisis, and the trade fight with the US kept pressure on consumers. Baidu explained that this environment pushed advertisers to “cut tech budgets,” a move that hit the platform hard because its search platform still depends heavily on marketing money.
Baidu attributes losses to weak ad business
In its report, Baidu claimed its online ad unit pulled in 15.3 billion yuan in the third quarter, a figure that marks an 18% drop from last year. The company stated that this fall showed how exposed it is to any drop in ad spending. Baidu added that weak ad demand has now become a long-term issue in China as local firms continue to save cash in any way that they can.
The company also reported that non‑marketing revenue hit 9.3 billion yuan, representing 21% over last year. The firm said this part of the business included cloud services, which kept growing because firms in China asked for tools to build AI agents and work with large language models. It also told investors the cloud division stayed strong even as the rest of the company took a hit.
Baidu also reported a net loss of 11 billion yuan, compared to a profit last year. The firm said most of the loss came from asset write‑downs. The company used the call to stress that it was pushing harder into artificial intelligence and trying to pull more users into its search platform by adding new AI tools. Baidu said competition in China stayed intense, pointing to Alibaba and DeepSeek as major rivals.
The firm added that both Alibaba and DeepSeek are fighting for both enterprise and consumer clients. The company added that it was investing more in its Ernie model and building new reasoning systems to keep up with demand. Last week, Baidu announced new AI chips for model training and inference as compute needs grew in China. The company said the chips were built to support heavier AI workloads and to help offset the weakness in its ad business.
