Emily Flippen

Okay.

Toby's right.

You can't fight me.

Unfortunately, you can't play with the headline numbers here, which is, Toby is right.

The ad market in China right now, it's bad across the board.

Baidu in particular, its dominance in search especially, it's having the alphabet problem, which is, it's still there, but they're losing ground, they're losing market share, and revenue is falling.

and its core business is ad placements.

That's just been incredibly weak for this company.

But I do think we are starting to see some return on investment for these initiatives.

While that hasn't made up for that core business falling, I think we're starting to see what the scale could be if Baidu does eventually get there.

In addition to their search business, of course, they're also a leading cloud infrastructure provider in China.

You can think a little bit like AWS here in the United States.

And their subscription-based AI solutions grew 128% year-over-year.

Now, these are solutions that were and are really expensive for Baidu to build out initially.

But it seems like that scale is starting to come.

So it's possible that a lot of the expenses, a lot of the costs that we saw Baidu experience over the last couple of years are going to be largely behind us now as Baidu looks to be a slightly more profitable future.

And while management hasn't necessarily guided for that yet...

I do think that they can eventually move in that direction.

It's possible.

And I hesitate only because we haven't heard management come out and outright say that.