[photopress:it_Robin_Li_Baidu_1.jpg,full,alignright]Baidu.com is the leading Chinese language internet search engine. It has 72% share of the Chinese language web search market and seems to be in an unattackable position.
Its fourth quarter revenues of $78.3 million exceeded market expectations of $77.2 million. Sequentially the revenue was 18% higher and 110% higher if mesured year on year.
For the year, its revenue of $239 million, represented a gain of 123% over the previous year’s revenues of $107 million, and beat market expectations of $232 million.
The company’s online marketing revenue grew to $78.1 million, and was 111.2% higher than the previous year.
Which is not bad.
To gain a wider market share, Baidu has recently launched a Japanese search engine. In addition, it is currently building its own C2C online auction platform which will begin to generate revenues for the company in the upcoming fiscal year 2008.
But. despite all this, its share price did not show significant upward movement. Having closed at $261.90 the day before the results, the stock price reached a high of $280.44 in the following trading session, but closed at $264.50. Since then, the share price has been constantly slipping — be it marginally — and is currently trading at $250.32.
How successful does founder Robin Li, seen in our illustration, have to be to make the figures soar?
Source: Seeking Alpha