On Monday, February 17th, Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, was absent from the private enterprise symposium attended by the CCP leader Xi Jinping. The day before, Baidu announced that its search engine and large language models would be integrated into “DeepSeek.” Industry insiders believe that this signifies Baidu’s search engine is losing its market dominance.
Xi Jinping attended the private enterprise symposium in Beijing, where many business tycoons were present, including Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba who had been under pressure for years. However, according to Reuters, citing two sources, there was no indication that Robin Li attended the meeting, and Baidu did not respond to requests for comments.
Reports indicate that the market closely watches the attendance of company executives at such important meetings, and the absence of company leaders may lead to speculation about the company’s position.
In the Hong Kong stock market, Baidu’s stock price dropped nearly 8.8% on Monday, but slightly recovered by the closing to a 7% decline, resulting in a $2.4 billion market value loss, making it the largest loser in the Hang Seng Index and Hang Seng Tech Index.
The official WeChat account of “Baidu Search” announced on Sunday, February 16th that Baidu Search and Wenxin Intelligent Platform would fully integrate the latest deep search feature of DeepSeek and the Wenxin large model.
Citing an analysis from a regional brokerage firm’s sales director, the report stated, “This means that after playing a leading role in the development of Ernie for many years, the company is now losing its edge.”
The sales director, who preferred not to reveal their identity, added that the absence of Baidu executives at the symposium could also lead to speculation that the company is losing its significant position in the market.
After OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022, Baidu was one of the first companies to introduce a similar style chatbot in early 2023.
According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, the previous belief that the private enterprise symposium would benefit the stock market did not materialize on Monday, with Hong Kong investors taking the opportunity to sell off profits, leading to a slight decline instead of a boost in the stock market.
Inspired by Xi Jinping’s meeting with private entrepreneurs like Jack Ma, the Hong Kong stock market continued its previous week’s uptrend, with the Hang Seng Index initially rising over 200 points on Monday morning, but losing momentum and eventually closing slightly down by 4 points at 22,616 points, a decrease of 0.02%.