At the 2021 Baidu World Conference held on August 18, the latest technological achievements of Baidu were unveiled. Among them, L5 level "Auto Robot" and unmanned vehicle travel service platform "Radish Run" were officially released, marking that Apollo entered the stage of large-scale commercial operation; The full scene landing of Baidu's intelligent cloud has enabled manufacturing, energy, urban management and other fields while helping to accelerate the intelligent upgrading of the industry. In the eyes of investment banks, the above is a strong proof of the second growth curve of Baidu AI business after becoming the company's mobile ecosystem. With the strong growth of intelligent cloud business and the potential market scale advantage of automatic driving, Baidu will rise in the coming wave of AI era.
CITIC Securities predicted in its research report on August 19 that Baidu's intelligent cloud and intelligent driving businesses would take over the mobile ecosystem and become the core driving force for the company's short-term and medium-term valuation improvement. "The market space of Baidu Intelligent Cloud is still very broad, because the demand of the domestic cloud computing market is shifting from the pan Internet field to the government and enterprise field, and intelligent transportation is one of the largest segments of Baidu Intelligent Cloud at present, and it is expected that the proportion of intelligence will exceed 30% in the next five years." CITIC Securities said, and it is expected that Baidu Intelligent Cloud 2021 The annual revenue will exceed 14 billion yuan, which is the company's fastest growing business in the medium term.
According to the recently released second quarter financial report, Baidu's smart cloud revenue grew rapidly, with a growth rate of 71%, far exceeding that of its peers, and the revenue growth of Baidu's smart cloud maintained a high growth rate of over 55% for three consecutive quarters. In its latest report "2020 Annual Research on China's AI Cloud Service Market", IDC also listed Baidu Smart Cloud as the largest AI cloud provider in China again.
In the field of automatic driving, compared with other competitors, Baidu has obvious advantages in traffic, data, market size and technology. CITIC Securities believes that from the current progress, Baidu will not only continue to maintain its leading edge in the medium and long term, but also open up greater valuation flexibility for the company.
Haitong Securities believes that Baidu is far superior to its peers in the field of automatic driving, and its advantage lies in Apollo's obvious advantage in high-quality L4 level data. In addition, there are many years of technology accumulation, continuous R&D investment and leading market size. Haitong Securities compares Baidu Apollo with Google Waymo and Tesla. In terms of data, Baidu Apollo uses Baidu High Precision Map and Apollo ACE enables automatic driving and unmanned vehicle services, enabling them to easily navigate complex scenes; In terms of technology, Baidu Apollo has reached the same L4 level as Waymo, greatly improving its security compared with the L3 technology used by Tesla. In terms of scale, Baidu Apollo's cumulative test mileage data ranked first in China. Accordingly, Haitong Securities said, "In the long run, Baidu Apollo may become one of the few players who can enter the final stage of the automated driving track."
The above views and IHS last week Markit's report "China's Automated Driving Market and Future Travel Market Outlook" expresses the same. The agency predicts that by 2030, the total market size of China's shared travel will reach 2.25 trillion, with a compound growth rate of up to 28%. Among them, Robotaxi will account for 60%, with a scale of 1.3 trillion yuan. At that time, the future trend of the travel market will turn to the unmanned vehicle travel market. At the same time, the industry will also usher in a new pattern: in the future, the main participants of Robotaxi will be concentrated in 2-3 service providers. Only the giant enterprises that have deep participation now will be able to occupy a favorable position in the competition in the next decade. With the advance layout of Internet of Vehicles and automatic driving, technology giants like Baidu will have a first mover advantage in future competition. So far, Baidu Apollo has obtained 336 autonomous driving test licenses, and has carried out autonomous driving tests in 27 cities across the country. The road test mileage has exceeded 14 million kilometers, and the number of autonomous driving patents has exceeded 2900.
"In the long run, Baidu's continuous investment in autonomous driving technology will achieve fruitful results through diversified commercialization models (unmanned vehicle service, ASD and electric vehicles)", Kenneth Fong, analyst of Credit Suisse It was predicted in its report on August 19. Earlier this year, Li Yanhong announced to the market three commercialization paths of autonomous driving, including providing host manufacturers with Apollo autonomous driving technology solutions, car manufacturing and driverless vehicle services.
HSBC believes in the research paper that Baidu has stepped on the rising momentum of the next technological innovation dividend era: technological innovation is Baidu's strength to promote business diversification and commercialization. Scientific and technological innovation, industrial transformation and public sector digitalization are Baidu's strategic priorities, which is consistent with China's "14th Five Year Plan" to "cultivate and expand emerging digital industries such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud computing, network security, and improve the level of communication equipment, core electronic components, key software, and other industries". This makes Baidu "closer to the harvest season".
As a leading domestic company with AI full stack R&D capability, Baidu has formed a closed loop from data acquisition, bottom computing power, software and hardware development, and has outstanding scale effect and synergy effect. And Baidu's strategic achievements in the industrialization of Baidu's intelligent cloud and Apollo automatic driving, car intelligence, intelligent transportation and other aspects at the 2021 World Congress also made Wall Street investment banks confident in Baidu's future development, and thus felt the scientific and technological strength and huge business prospects in China's artificial intelligence field.
