More than two years ago, if users searched for disease problems in Baidu, there would be no more effective information and services except Baidu Encyclopedia, which they often visited, and hospitals with good and bad qualities. Today, the situation is very different. Users can see the authoritative doctors' knowledge of disease science, 24-hour online consultation, the list of recommended experts from the top three hospitals, and the famous doctors waiting to connect with you in the live broadcast room.
This change was brought about by Baidu Health, which was founded less than two years ago. At first, Baidu Health just integrated the original "encyclopedia" and "ask doctors" and other businesses. At present, Baidu Health has formed five service systems, including health science popularization, online consultation, chronic disease management, health mall, and Internet hospital services.
What has Baidu Health done right over the past year? In the future, how important is Baidu's health to Baidu?
"Content+service" strategy works
The industry believes that 2014 is the "first year of Internet health", when Tencent, Alibaba and JD's related businesses have improved. One year later, Baidu joined the company and set up a medical business department, but two years later, Baidu was abolished. It was not until 2020, when the digital economy broke out, that Baidu really decided to bet on the grand health track.
In March 2020, Baidu established a wholly-owned subsidiary Baidu Health, with a registered capital of 30 million yuan, legal representative of Li Ning, manager of Yang Minglu, and ultimate beneficiary of Li Yanhong. Yang Minglu, general manager of Baidu Health, once said that he hoped Baidu Health would become the preferred "health steward" for Chinese people.
Internet health is a big industry. Ali Health and JD Health are companies with a market value of several hundred billion yuan. In the opinion of Taoist Ding, the former president of the Speedway Research Institute, Baidu Health still has a chance. He believes that Baidu Health may have more users than JD, and Baidu Search is the largest search engine. It has mastered the traffic portal, and hundreds of millions of users search health related knowledge every day, which is a favorable condition for its development.
On the development path, Baidu Health is different from Alibaba Health and JD Health, and adopts the "content+service" model. Baidu's core advantage is the search engine, so it takes search as the starting point to activate the content ecology and service ecology on the platform. This model has indeed accelerated the development of various businesses of Baidu Health.
At present, Baidu Health serves 100 million users every day, meeting the daily average demand of 200 million health content retrieval. At the same time, Baidu Health included 500 million authoritative popular science content, attracted more than 300000 professional doctors to settle in, and responded to more than 2 million online medical consulting services every day. In addition, Baidu Health has also formed a content ecology with Baidu Health Medical Code as the core and a service ecology with Baidu Health Asking Doctors as the core.
For this big industry, traffic and technology can help Baidu cut in quickly and healthily, but if you want to take root, you need to go deep into the industry. Just from the layout in the first half of the year, Baidu Health announced that it would cooperate with Cangzhou People's Hospital to build the first Internet hospital, build a precise doctor patient matching engine for users, hospitals and doctors, upgrade the medical code to an open platform and open authoritative popular science knowledge to ecological partners for free. In addition, Baidu Health also invested in the Internet health science popularization platform, Youlai Doctor, and the pharmaceutical supply chain platform, Pharmacist Help.
These healthy industrial chain layouts are constantly improving Baidu's healthy industrial Internet ecological capabilities. "Baidu Health hopes to comprehensively improve the platform's health service capability by building a complete 'Internet+Health' service chain," Yang Minglu once said.
Baidu's new growth pole is great health?
In February 2017, Baidu Medical Business Unit, which was then part of Baidu's emerging business group, was abolished. Baidu responded that this is to adjust and optimize the organizational structure of the medical business, focus on superior resources, and focus the medical business on the field of artificial intelligence, so as to better adapt to the new development of the medical industry and more effectively layout the medical field.
Before the adjustment, Baidu CEO Robin Li also mentioned in his internal letter that the products without market competitiveness should be eliminated. "It's time to withdraw, close, and merge. Resources should focus on Baidu's advantageous and strategically important projects." At that time, it was reported that Baidu Medical Affairs Department was doing O2O business, but that business was no longer Baidu's focus, It is also reasonable to cut it.
However, under the new strategy, the industry vertical content of Big Health is of great significance to Baidu. Shen Shao, executive vice president of Baidu Group, once said that in some key industries, Baidu should go deep into the closed-loop industry construction services through self building, such as big health, live broadcast, short video, education and other fields. This is because Baidu has released the X+Y strategy of mobile ecology, that is, "horizontally expand the user scale, vertically deepen the industry vertical", and Big Health belongs to the industry vertical. Shen Shao believes that this will continue to increase the ecological supply, and also represents the most critical change of Baidu mobile ecology in the coming years.
In the era of mobile Internet, Baidu missed out on a number of outlet products, resulting in insufficient search content. And Big Health has become a new highlight. Baidu related people recently told the Securities Daily that "Baidu Health, which started more than a year ago, has become the key business of Baidu Mobile Ecological Business Group." At present, among many new products, Baidu Health has become the flagship product of Daily Life of 100 million.
From the perspective of other products in the industry, the traffic brought by Internet health is huge. As of December 31, 2020, the number of active users of JD Health reached 89.8 million, an increase of 33.7 million in one year; More than 110000 full-time and external doctors practice in "Jingdong Health Internet Hospital", with an average daily online consultation volume of more than 100000. Alibaba Health Traffic Portal is on Alipay Health Channel, with 520 million active users annually. In September last year, Alibaba Health APP was upgraded to "Medical Deer" APP, which was launched half a year and has a monthly life of one million, with an average daily online consultation service of 80000 times.
In addition, the content ecology also laid the foundation for the transaction closed-loop. At the financial report conference call in February this year, Baidu said that it has outstanding advantages in science popularization and consultation, which fully enlivens the service closed-loop of Baidu mobile ecology from the starting point of search to the end point, and demonstrates the liquidity of Baidu's ecological diversification.
Ding Daoshi told the reporter that JD has built another JD through JD Health. Although Baidu Health cannot say that it can build another Baidu, it is certainly an imaginative market. For Baidu, which has fallen out of the first echelon of the Internet, it really needs a new growth point of performance. The development of other Internet health companies has verified the feasibility of profitability.
In terms of market value, Ali Health is currently about 150.4 billion yuan, and JD Health is 242.8 billion yuan. In fiscal year 2020, JD Health's total revenue was 19.38 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 78.8%, and its profit under non international financial reporting standards was 750 million yuan. Ali Health achieved an operating revenue of 15.519 billion yuan, up 61.7% year on year; The net profit was about 343 million yuan, with a loss of 15.696 million yuan in the same period last year; After adjustment, the net profit was 630 million yuan, up 198.5% year on year.
