Baidu Beats Estimates, Posts Impressive Revenue Growth

This afternoon Baidu released its second quarter financial results. The company made 5.46 billion yuan or $858.8 million, a nearly 60 percent increase from a year ago. Profit was 2.815 billion yuan or  $443.1 million a roughly 52 percent increase from last year.

The company also said that revenue per customer was roughly $2,440 against a customer base of 352,000 online advertisers in Q2. Revenue per advertiser was up roughly 35 percent vs. last year.

Baidu traffic acquisition costs were 8.3 percent of total revenue, up from 7.8 percent in Q1. However, by comparison Google’s traffic acquisition costs are 25 percent of ad revenues. Baidu has about $2.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short term investments.

Baidu currently controls more than three-fourths of the Chinese PC search market. CEO Robin Li said in a prepared statement that Baidu would be focusing on mobile and cloud computing as growth areas.

Baidu recently agreed to a search revenue sharing deal with Apple in China for iOS devices. Otherwise Baidu is the default search engine on almost 80 percent of Android phones in China.

China has roughly 540 million internet users and 900 million mobile users, about 388 million of which are mobile internet users. That’s according to the China Internet Network Information Center. It’s the single largest internet and mobile market in the world.