Being as 1/3 of BAT (Baidu, Ali and Tencent), Baidu’s breakthroughs in mobile ecology have not attracted enough attention from the outside world in recent years, but this may be the key to Baidu’s return to the top players in China’s IT industry.

According to Baidu’s second-quarter financial report released on August 14, 2020, Baidu was affected by factors such as the epidemic, but still achieved revenue of RMB 26.003 billion, a year-on-year decrease of only 1%. As of June 30, 2020, the number of daily active users of Baidu App has increased by 16 million in the past 12 months to 204 million, a year-on-year increase of 8.5%.

The three pillars of Baidu’s mobile ecosystem are Baijiahao, Smart apps, and Baidu hosting page, all of which have maintained strong growth.

• Baijiahao creators are about 3.4 million, a year-on-year increase of 52%;
• The number of monthly active users of smart mini programs has reached 339 million, an increase of 25% year-on-year, and the number of smart mini programs has reached 5 times that of the same period in 2019;
• Baidu hosting page revenue contributes about 30% of Baidu’s core online marketing service revenue. A large number of businesses in different industries are shifting their search result landing pages from H5 sites to hosting pages.

According to the “China Mobile Internet 2020 Semi-Annual Report” released by QuestMobile on July 28, 2020, as of June 30, 2020, Baidu ranked third among the mobile Internet giants with 91.2% of the mobile market penetration rate. It is next to Tencent (98.7%) and Alibaba (97.6%), significantly surpassing Toutiao (66.7%) and Kuaishou (44.7%).

Based on search and information flow dual engines, Baidu has gradually constructed a super App with information and knowledge as its core, and has formed a unique closed loop of the ecological chain. An important feature is that the frequency of user usage and the length of user usage have greatly increased, with 2/3 of Baidu users logging into Baidu every day.

The purely tool Baidu has become a thing of the past, and the one-stop service Baidu has arrived.