China’s Baidu Starts Layoffs After Reporting Third-Quarter Loss

China’s Baidu started layoffs this week that may per chance hit a pair of alternate objects, six sources briefed on the topic said, as the company struggles with intensifying competition in man made intelligence and declining promoting revenue. The pass by the company, which runs China’s most keen search engine, comes right now after it reported a third-quarter loss on November 18. The sources added that the layoffs had been expected to flee unless the cease of this year.

Reuters became once no longer ready to place the companywide sequence of jobs being slice, however the sources said it became once internally perceived to be paunchy-scale. The layoff numbers varied by alternate unit and performance scores and will attain as high as 40% for some groups, two of the of us said.

The cell ecosystem team will have the brunt of the cuts, two sources said. On the other hand, roles tied to AI and cloud computing will largely be right, said four of the of us. One of the sources said extra resources may per chance presumably be directed to AI.
The sources declined to be named as the guidelines is private.

Baidu’s team stood at 35,900 on the cease of closing year, down from 39,800 in 2023 and 41,300 a year earlier, per its annual experiences. Baidu did in a roundabout draw answer to a question for comment.

The cuts apply Baidu’s second straight quarterly revenue decline; entire revenue fell 7% and online promoting revenue dropped 18% in the third quarter. It furthermore posted an absence of 11.23 billion yuan ($1.59 billion) for the interval.

Baidu has spent years investing in AI, but these efforts have but to revive boost in its core online promoting alternate, which has ceded market allotment to social media platforms like RedNote and ByteDance’s Douyin. Though Baidu became once the key main Chinese language tech firm to roll out a ChatGPT-kind carrier in 2023, it has struggled to preserve an early lead towards opponents, including Alibaba and AI birth-up DeepSeek. Baidu’s Ernie paunchy language model is trailing offerings from opponents, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, after a pair of draw shifts, including a pass to originate-source it earlier this year.

Adoption has furthermore lagged. In September, Baidu’s Ernie Bot app had 10.77 million monthly active users, decrease than 150 million for ByteDance’s Doubao and 73.4 million for DeepSeek, per AI product tracker Aicpb.com. Baidu has centered its AI push on embedding the expertise into recent merchandise, including search, and says bigger than half of its cell search end result pages now consist of AI-generated suppose material.

Job reductions have become a overall tool for main Chinese language web corporations seeking out to slice funds in a extremely aggressive sector.

Alibaba and Tencent slashed tens of thousands of jobs in 2022 to take care of a astronomical regulatory crackdown on China’s main web platforms. In addition, loads of tech corporations in the US, like Amazon and IBM, are cutting thousands of jobs globally.