Weak ad demand hits Baidu core business as quarterly revenue declines 7%

Baidu reported weaker numbers on Tuesday after the company said quarterly revenue fell 7% as its ad business slumped again.

The Chinese company told investors that total sales came in at “31.17 billion yuan” ($4.38 billion), a figure pulled from data reviewed by LSEG. Baidu also said its U.S.-listed shares were “little changed” in early trading as the market tried to process the slowdown.

Baidu blamed China’s economic problems for the hit. The company said demand in the country stayed soft because the property sector remained in crisis and the trade fight with the U.S. kept pressure on consumers.

The company explained that this environment caused advertisers to “cut tech budgets,” a move that hit Baidu hard because its search platform still depends heavily on marketing money.

Track ad losses and report cloud growth

Baidu said its online ad unit pulled in “15.3 billion yuan” in the third quarter, which marked an 18% drop from last year. The company stated that this fall showed how exposed it is to any slowdown in ad spending. Baidu added that weak ad demand has now become a long-term issue in China as local firms continue to save cash wherever they can.

The company then reported that non‑marketing revenue reached “9.3 billion yuan”, which was 21% higher than last year. Baidu said this part of the business included cloud services, which kept growing because firms in China asked for tools to build AI agents and work with large language models. It also told investors the cloud division stayed strong even as the rest of the company took a hit.

Baidu also reported a “net loss of 11 billion yuan”, compared with a profit last year, and said most of the loss came from asset write‑downs. The company used the call to stress that it was pushing harder into artificial intelligence and trying to pull more users into its search platform by adding new AI tools.

Baidu said competition in China stayed intense, pointing to Alibaba and DeepSeek as major rivals fighting for both enterprise and consumer clients. The company added that it was investing more in its Ernie model and building new reasoning systems to keep up with demand.

Last week, Baidu announced new AI chips for model training and inference as compute needs grew in China. The company said the chips were built to support heavier AI workloads and to help offset the weakness in its ad business.

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