Emily Flippen

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.

Whereas I think if we saw that going to happen over the course of, say, 2026, management would be very clear in terms of the guidance that they expect to come in.

And to Toby's point, a lot of the commentary we're getting from management are just around their AI initiative.

All of these other different pies that Baidu's fingers are stuck in right now.

And we don't see the actual tangible outcomes coming out from these initiatives yet.

But I think it's entirely possible that over the course of, say, the next five

years, over the course of, say, the next 10 years, that all it takes is one of these pies to bake particularly well to more than make up for the core search business, even if that core search business does continue to decline.

I actually think that the area that this could be that doesn't get nearly enough investor attention is self-driving solutions.

We talk about Tesla and others.