AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)12/15 Report--

Baidu is considering moving into the car-building industry. According to Reuters and several domestic media reports on the 15th, a source revealed that Baidu is considering producing its own electric car and has held talks with Geely, GAC GROUP and FAW on this possibility. or form a joint venture with a majority stake, but no agreement has been reached.

In response to this, Baidu did not give a clear answer, only responded to "do not comment on market rumors."

People familiar with the matter also said that Baidu intends to use contract manufacturing to produce electric vehicles and is likely to form an advantage holding joint venture with traditional carmakers, while Baidu currently has the technology related to self-driving and intelligent networking facilities. can provide a technical basis for electric vehicles.

It is not uncommon for Internet companies to get involved in self-driving and provide intelligent car technology solutions, including Baidu, Huawei, Google's Waymo and so on. Among them, Baidu set up its self-driving business Apollo Apollo as early as 2017 and worked with a number of domestic car companies to promote self-driving tests.

In October, Baidu officially announced that its self-driving taxi service was fully available in Beijing. Baidu self-driving taxis are equipped with security guards to ensure driving safety at any time. Prior to this, Baidu has taken the lead in launching Baidu intelligent rental vehicle application demonstration in Changsha, Guangzhou, Cangzhou and other cities.

If the above news is true, Baidu may be the first Internet company "eager" to build its own car.

In November, Changan announced that it was working with Huawei and Ningde era to build a new high-end smart car brand. Huawei has repeatedly reiterated that it will not build cars, so it is likely to play the role of a provider of smart car solutions here. Earlier, Huawei launched the "Huawei Hi" brand, which includes three parts: ADS advanced autopilot technology, smart cockpit and smart electric.

At the end of November, the news of SAIC, Alibaba and Pudong New area jointly building high-end intelligent pure electric vehicles was officially announced. Of the new company, SAIC contributed 5.4 billion, Alibaba contributed 1.8 billion, and other investors.

According to the news, Baidu hopes to form a joint venture with a majority stake and a contract manufacturing model for traditional car companies to produce electric cars. So it also shows that, unlike other Internet companies, Baidu is more eager to build its own cars and seems to be trying to build a new brand through its strengths in self-driving technology.

However, all this is too early to say, whether Baidu car will really come, the authorities have not confirmed.

Baidu reported that in the third quarter of 2020, Baidu achieved revenue of 28.2 billion yuan, and the net profit attributed to Baidu reached 13.7 billion yuan, both exceeding Wall Street expectations. The core of Baidu is still "online advertising", with revenue of 18.4 billion yuan.

When referring to the new business of Apollo, Baidu said: the commercialization of Baidu Apollo has been carried out step by step, with strong development momentum in areas such as intelligent transportation and self-driving. In August, Baidu won the bid for a new intelligent transportation infrastructure project in Guangzhou Development Zone, with a project amount of nearly 460 million yuan, which may become the largest bidding order in the domestic intelligent transportation field this year. In September, Baidu was awarded China's first fully self-driving test license in Changsha, meaning that Baidu will formally remove safety guards on Changsha's open roads and carry out completely self-driving road tests. Recently, Baidu self-driving taxi service Apollo Go officially landed in Beijing, which is the third city to open the service after Changsha and Cangzhou.

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