百度 (BIDU) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Hello and thank you for standing by for Baidu's first-quarter 2016 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions).

Today's conference is being recorded.

If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's conference, Sharon Ng, Baidu's Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Baidu's first-quarter 2016 earnings conference call.

Baidu's earnings release was distributed earlier today and you can find a copy on our website as well as on newswire services.

Today you will hear from Robin Li, Baidu's Chief Executive Officer, and Jennifer Li, Baidu's Chief Financial Officer.

After their prepared remarks, Robin and Jennifer will answer your questions.

Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations.

Potential risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those outlined in our public filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 20-F.

Baidu does not take undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable law.

Our earnings press release and this call include discussions of certain unaudited, non-GAAP financial measures.

Our press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to the unaudited most directly comparable GAAP measures and is available on our IR website at ir.baidu.com.

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

In addition, a webcast of this conference call will also be available on Baidu's IR website.

I will now turn the call over to Baidu's CEO, Robin Li.

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining today's call.

We had a terrific start to 2016, with a strong performance in the first quarter.

Search and iQiyi grew strongly and GMV ramped rapidly, increasing nearly fourfold year over year.

Mobile grew particularly well this quarter and hit a new milestone, contributing 60% of total revenue off the back of improving search monetization capability, driven by product and technology innovation.

This quarter we made notable progress in executing on our mission of connecting users with information and services and we made great headway towards providing our customers and merchants with a fully integrated platform, one that meets their needs not only for online marketing but for transaction services as well.

We have invested heavily not only to enhance, but ultimately to redefine the search experience.

We continue to innovate to improve the search interface by further improving the accuracy of voice and visual search and upgrading search results to make them more personalized, targeted, action-oriented and content-rich.

These improvements drove the year-over-year upward trend in both mobile and PC CPM.

And Baidu Brain, our name for Baidu's AI infrastructure, as well as the tight integration of products across our platform made this possible.

Baidu has a unique platform that users turn to in order to discover and connect with whatever it is they are looking for across any vertical and category at any time and from any place.

More and more they are able to fulfill through a seamless closed loop.

Our users touch multiple Baidu products every day.

And the insights that we glean from their use of multiple products enable us to personalize and tailor the experience and give our users the fastest path to what they're looking for.

We parlay the high intent that search users bring into great ROI for merchants.

Customers both large and small partner with Baidu and we match them to the user demographics they seek and do it at large scale.

Increasingly, we provide our customers with a full, integrated solution that leverages Baidu's wide range of products and infrastructure.

This sets us apart from our peers in both online marketing and in transaction services.

Search, maps and our local service platform Nuomi are cornerstones of our integrated offering that mutually share content and enrich each other.

Search provides a very meaningful portion of traffic to both maps and Nuomi.

Maps and Nuomi in turn also further enrich search results with local extensions and transaction capability.

For example, as of end of March Baidu maps had 1.5m points of interest that enabled closed loop transactions.

Nearly 70% of those points of interest were provided by Nuomi which tripled its merchant coverage year over year.

Accessing merchant listings, points of interest and services is easily done through any of the gateways and users can complete transactions wherever they start.

We offer local merchants a compelling unparalleled value proposition.

Baidu helps connect online to offline and helps merchants to drive user foot traffic to storefronts across a broad range of local services.

We made it easy to get started on the Baidu platform by offering solutions that best suit their needs and by offering top-notch infrastructure with low startup costs.

Earlier this week Nuomi announced that it would be waiving take rate and provide a cost-per-click marketing model for newer emerging local services verticals, such as wedding services, health and beauty and home services to name a few.

This is one of the many ways Baidu can work with merchants in underpenetrated verticals to bring them on our platform and provide them with an opportunity to experience Baidu's value proposition.

Our Local Express infrastructure ties together our powerful cornerstone products of search, maps and Nuomi and has expanded merchant scale dramatically.

Local Express reached over 200,000 merchants by the end of March and verticals covered by Local Express now include retail, education, healthcare and property among many more.

A great example is Chow Tai Fook, the popular jewelry retailer.

Baidu worked with Chow Tai Fook to drive leads through our online marketing platform and enable a closed loop transaction through Nuomi.

In mid-April over 2,000 Chow Tai Fook stores have launched their Local Express account.

And in the first week after the launch in early March, Chow Tai Fook offers sold by Nuomi were up nearly tenfold from the week before, driving foot traffic to their offline stores.

Baidu Takeout Delivery also continued to grow rapidly.

We are the market leader in most top-tier cities like Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou among the non-student demographic.

From the beginning, Baidu Takeout Delivery has catered to the working age demographic which has significant spending power and values high-quality food and superior service.

This was the right strategic decision and our focus on the demographic with higher spending power has given us a lasting advantage.

Takeout Delivery offers an ever-expanding range of carefully vetted merchants and continues to improve logistical efficiency.

We have seen the number of orders delivered per delivery person per day and the on time ratio increase steadily quarter over quarter.

At the end of 2015, Baidu Takeout Delivery became a separate entity and this week we signed to close another round of financing from Baidu and other financial sponsors at a post-money valuation of $2.5b.

Baidu remains very supportive of the Baidu Takeout Delivery business and continues to hold a majority stake.

Baidu Wallet also gained strength, with activated Baidu Wallet accounts growing in the quarter from 53m at end of 2015 to 65m at the end of Q1 2016.

In the first quarter we ran various holiday promotions and deepened integration across 15 Baidu products, including Mobile Baidu, Baidu Cloud, maps and Post Bar.

Nuomi and Takeout Delivery also continued to observe the increased share of orders completed with Baidu Wallet.

With our vast distribution platform, merchant network and unparalleled data and technology capabilities, Baidu is uniquely positioned to play a transformative role in financial services.

With our data and technology capabilities we can better evaluate credit risks and provide more accurate user profiling.

For example, we have long lasting relationships with thousands of educational institutions through our core search capability and we have a much better understanding of the quality of their training programs.

Baidu began working with over 250 educational institutions to provide credit loans to qualifying students.

These credit loans aid the growth of the education industry and enable credit-worthy students, students who might not otherwise have had the means, to take the courses they need.

Our multiyear investment in artificial intelligence and, particularly in deep learning, continues to pay dividends across many products.

Baidu Brain supports all product lines and now enables us to offer a more relevant result to users, higher click-through rates to customers, faster delivery time for Takeout Delivery, highly naturalistic text-to-speech features for news users just to name a few.

Deep learning will be one of Baidu's key technology advantages as we move forward in autonomous driving.

We believe that the automobile is the next major computing platform and that advances and innovation will happen quickly, especially here in China where the problems that autonomous driving addresses are so pronounced.

We are aggressively beefing up our R&D efforts in this area, both here in China and at our US R&D center in Silicon Valley.

Baidu's strengths in high-definition mapping and in deep-learning-powered computer vision will prove to be decisive advantages and we are on track now to deploy autonomous vehicles powered by Baidu technology in 2018, with production at scale by 2020.

Moving now to iQiyi, iQiyi continued to perform robustly, holding the leading position by MAU and user monthly time spent according to iResearch in March 2016.

In the first quarter iQiyi subscriptions grew particularly well off the back of iQiyi's exclusive and very popular Korean drama Descendants of the Sun which aired in Korea and on iQiyi in China at the same time.

iQiyi has established its place as the online video platform of choice and a hub for popular culture.

Online video is an important vertical for Baidu, with iQiyi providing invaluable high-quality content.

iQiyi benefits from its strategic cooperation with Baidu across multiple fronts, including search traffic, ad targeting and big data.

We look forward to maintaining a close strategic partnership with iQiyi.

Over the last year, Baidu has opened of number of our quality assets to outside investors.

And under this program we have now received investments in Baidu Takeout Delivery, Baidu Music, Zuoyebang, 91 Desktop and more recently Baidu video aggregation platform.

These initiatives help unlock hidden value for Baidu and provide an alignment of incentives and success to management and teams of these businesses.

As announced in our earnings press release earlier today, Mr. William Decker will step down from our Board, having served as a Board Member and Audit Committee Chairman since October of 2005.

On behalf of Baidu's Board of Directors I would like to express my gratitude to Bill for his long-lasting dedication and invaluable contribution to Baidu.

Meanwhile, I would like to welcome Mr. Brent Callinicos as our new Audit Committee Chairman.

Brent has served as an Independent Director on our Board since October last year and brings extensive industry experience to the position.

We look forward to his leadership on our Audit Committee.

I'm very excited to unfurl what Baidu has in store for 2016 and beyond.

Baidu plays a key role in driving innovation in China.

With our accumulated investments in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, and our large, scalable platform and infrastructure we are uniquely positioned to capture the vast opportunities in China.

Our core search business is robust and opens up new opportunities for Baidu.

We will actively pursue new opportunities where we have competitive advantage and drive change that will help transform people's daily lives.

The transformation of the financial services industry and the transportation sector through technology, through innovation like autonomous driving and Internet finance, are but a few of the opportunities on this horizon.

Progress in these new areas should be viewed over a long-term time horizon and we are confident that the investments will create long-term value for shareholders.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Jennifer for an update on financials.

Thank you, Robin.

We are very pleased to report a very strong quarter, driven by superb performance of our core search business and iQiyi.

We've also further executed on our mission to build the Next Baidu.

I would like to reiterate that the annual cost expense guidance that I provided last quarter for the full-year 2016 continues to hold.

The pace of spend may vary quarter on quarter based on the timing of events and activities kicking in.

At the beginning of this month we released our 20-F, and for the first time we provided segment reporting for search services, transaction services and iQiyi.

We plan to provide segment reporting on an annual basis in our 20-F.

On a quarterly basis we will continue to report on the margin impact of transaction services and iQiyi.

Our business will evolve over the next few quarters and we will provide the appropriate level of visibility to the investment community and we will continue to update you on metrics that reflect that state of our business.

Also bear in mind that Q1 was our first full quarter of deconsolidation of Qunar.

And for ease of comparison we have provided apples-to-apples financials excluding Qunar.

In Q1 we recognized in Other Income two months of equity pick-up of Ctrip's fourth-quarter 2015 net income.

For Q2 onwards we will recognize a full quarter of equity pick-up of Ctrip's income on a quarter-lag basis.

Now moving on to financials.

All monetary amounts are in RMB unless stated otherwise.

For the first quarter, total revenues were RMB15.8b, representing a 24% increase from the corresponding period in 2015.

The year-over-year increase is 31%, excluding Qunar in the first quarter of 2015.

During the first quarter Baidu had approximately 587,000 active online marketing customers, representing a 12% increase from the corresponding period in 2015, and a 24% year-over-year increase, excluding Qunar in the first quarter of 2015.

Revenue per online marketing customer for the first quarter was RMB25,400, a 6.7% increase from the corresponding period in 2015, a 1.6% year-over-year increase, excluding Qunar in the first quarter of 2015, and an 18% decrease compared to the fourth quarter of 2015.

Traffic acquisition cost as a component of cost of revenues in Q1 was RMB2.2b, representing 14% of total revenues, flat from the corresponding period in 2015.

Bandwidth costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB1.1b, representing 6.9% of total revenues compared to 6.7% in the corresponding period in 2015.

Depreciation costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB707m, representing 4.5% of total revenues compared to 4.6% of the corresponding period in 2015.

Operational costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB1.1b, representing 6.9% of total revenues compared to 4.7% in the corresponding period in 2015.

This increase was mainly due to transaction services and iQiyi-related operating costs.

Content costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB1.4b, representing 8.7% of total revenues compared to 4.8% in the corresponding period in 2015.

The increase was mainly due to iQiyi's increased content costs.

SG&A expenses in Q1 were RMB3.9b, representing an increase of 33% from the corresponding period in 2015, and a year-over-year increase of 64%, excluding Qunar in the first quarter of 2015.

The year-over-year increase was mainly due to an increase in promotional spending for transaction services.

R&D expenses in Q1 were RMB2.1b, an 8.1% decrease from the corresponding period in 2015 and a year-over-year increase of 5%, excluding Qunar.

The increase was mainly due to an increase in the number of R&D personnel.

Share-based compensation expenses, which were allocated to related operating costs and expense line items, were RMB309m in Q1 compared to RMB291m in the corresponding period in 2015.

Excluding Qunar, the SBC cost was RMB201m in the first quarter of 2015.

This year-over-year increase with Qunar's impact excluded was a result of increased share grants to employees.

Operating profit was RMB2.2b, representing a 2.6% increase from the corresponding period in 2015 and a year-over-year decrease of 12% after excluding Qunar's impact in the first quarter of 2015.

Non-GAAP operating profit was RMB2.5b, a 3% increase from the corresponding period in 2015 and a year-over-year decrease of 6.7%, excluding Qunar.

Income tax expenses were RMB675m for the first quarter.

The effective tax rate for the first quarter was 25.4% compared to 20.7% in Q1 2015.

The increase of effective tax rate for the first quarter of 2016 reflects that some loss-generating entities in the Group cannot be consolidated for tax purposes under PRC tax law.

The net income attributable to Baidu for Q1 was RMB2b, a 19% decrease from the corresponding period in 2015.

Basic and diluted earnings per ADS for the first quarter amounted to RMB5.4 and RMB5.38 respectively.

Non-GAAP net income attributable to Baidu for Q1 was RMB2.4b, a 14% decrease year on year.

Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS were RMB6.8.

As of Q1, the Company had cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of RMB71.3b.

Net operating cash inflow and CapEx for the first quarter were RMB4.7b and RMB826m respectively.

Total headcount on a consolidated basis, including invested entities, was about 43,500 as of the end of the first quarter of 2016.

This represents an increase of 5% compared to the end of the last quarter.

Now let's provide you with our top-line guidance for the second quarter of 2016.

We currently expect total revenues for the second quarter to be between RMB20.11b and RMB20.58b, representing a 21.3% to 24.2% year-over-year increase.

On an apples-to-apples basis, excluding Qunar from Baidu's financials, the guidance represents a 28.1% to 31.1% year-over-year increase.

Please note this forecast reflects Baidu's current and preliminary view and is subject to change.

I will now open the call to questions.

Operator, please go ahead.

(Operator Instructions).

Eddie Leung, Merrill Lynch.

Good morning.

Thank you for taking my questions.

Just two quick ones.

The first one is about your advertising number.

It was a pretty good quarter in terms of sequential growth.

So could you share more color with us?

Did you add back some of travel-related clients from Qunar or were they related to your O2O business?

And then secondly, a bit longer term -- about the longer-term outlook, there seems to be a trend that Internet users are consuming video content within social media.

So will these trends affect the usage of search down the road and how can Baidu deal with the trend?

Thank you.

Hi, Eddie.

We did deconsolidate Qunar for this quarter.

And of course Qunar's business was concentrated on the travel vertical.

But even having said that, travel vertical is one of the major verticals for us for many years and it continues to be a major vertical for us.

For the online travel agents who do advertising with us, they would be counted as online marketing customers and tend to not particularly attract transaction with the service-related customers.

So there are -- we do have thousands of customers in that vertical.

I did not really track specifically the Qunar-related marketing customers, whether they are or are not included in this past quarter.

But bear in mind Baidu's search is a very powerful and performance-based marketing platform and that there are clients that would do advertising activities on multiple platforms and Baidu continues to be a very attractive platform for many of these advertisers.

So just to conclude, the travel vertical continues to be one of our major verticals.

So on video contents, yes, they are popular not only among social media but it's also very popular across the board for all Internet and mobile products.

That why you see iQiyi is constantly ranked among the top two in the Apple App Store.

And we also invested in other short-form video content companies like Kuai Shou.

And we fully and seamlessly integrate this kind of video content in our Baidu core search, Mobile Baidu app.

And users who search for video content on Baidu can get the most comprehensive and the best user experience for video content.

And we did see that the click-through-rate for video content and exposure for video content in our search results increased significantly over the past quarter.

Dick Wei, Credit Suisse.

Hi.

Thanks for taking my questions.

I have a question on the recent Company restructuring.

I wonder what is the strategic reason for the restructuring?

And how should we expect Baidu's focus to change in terms of strategy and in terms of maybe amount and area of investments?

Thank you.

Yes.

Basically, before the restructuring, Mobile Baidu and maps was under one leadership and Baidu search and Nuomi was under another leadership.

We combined the two to form the Baidu Search company.

I think this is basically is the core business for Baidu.

And other than that or outside of Baidu Search, we do have those new areas, such as Internet finance, autonomous driving and the underlying technology, such as artificial intelligence.

I personally would probably spend more time on these newer business initiatives and technologies.

The core search business, including transaction services, under one leadership would make the Company more efficient and robust.

Just to add on that, it's an internal organization change.

We have not formed a separate legal entity.

The effort is, as we mentioned, we're building an integrated platform and this arrangement will help us to make better internal alignment and help us service our users and merchants more effectively.

Erica Poon Werkun, UBS.

Thank you.

I've got two questions here.

The first one, I'm just wondering if you can update us on any changes to the competitive landscape for the various O2O segments you engage in.

And if you can just let us know where you are in terms of investment cycle for O2O.

And the second question is on Baidu map.

I'm just wondering if can share with us the progress of monetization for Baidu map.

How many of the merchants shown on Baidu map are actual paying advertising customers?

Thank you.

Yes.

On O2O I think Nuomi has made significant progress both in terms of overall experience, including the coverage for merchants and number of deals available.

And we also continue to take market share from the competition.

And quarter after quarter I think our market share started around 10% at the beginning of last year and now we are well over 20% as of last quarter.

And the trend continues as we enter into the current quarter.

While we see all this kind of better and better metrics, our investment is prudent.

I think we pay a lot of attention to our ROI for subsidies for Nuomi business.

And like I mentioned during the prepared remarks, we view this as an integral part of the overall Baidu core business, including search and maps.

They cross-leverage with each other and we do not necessarily need to use just one piece to compete with other companies.

Map is right now not really focused on monetization but more focused on connecting users with services.

We pay attention to the daily active users.

We pay attention to the number of closed loop transactions enabled.

We pay attention to the points of interest that's available to our users, the quality of those POIs and rich content in those POIs.

Vivian Hao, JPMorgan.

Hi.

Thank you for taking my question.

My question is also around the O2O area.

For Takeout Delivery what percentage of orders are fulfilled by our in-house delivery team right now?

And also what is our long-term goal in terms of local logistics development and also investment?

Thank you.

Yes.

For Takeout Delivery, as I mentioned, we target the more high-end affluent user demographic.

So we care a lot about the service quality both for the supplying restaurant as well as the delivery team.

So right now, over 50% of the orders are delivered by our logistic people.

The long-term goal is really to continue to lead in the top-tier cities among the white-collar demographic who are not that price sensitive, and we will continue to improve the service quality, and continue to integrate this service with existing Baidu services from Nuomi and other products.

Chi Tsang, HSBC.

Please go ahead.

Good morning.

Thanks for taking my questions.

I wanted to ask you about AI.

In particular, I was wondering if you could discuss the business model for autonomous vehicles.

And secondly, if you can give us an update on Dumi, your virtual assistant.

How is the product developing and what sort of activity levels are you seeing?

Thank you so much.

Yes, we have invested in AI for many, many years.

We believe we're leading in the sector, not only in China, but around the world.

This enables us to do disruptive things, like autonomous driving.

And it's kind of early for us to talk about the business model, because right now our focus is to solve those technical problems first, to make autonomous driving fully autonomous.

Our target is not to self-drive, like in 90%, 95% of the cases, but to really release the driver from the driver's seat.

So this will take a couple of years.

We will worry about the business model later on.

Regarding Dumi, it's tracking very well, and especially for our speech recognition capability and natural language understanding capability.

We have Dumi function in the Mobile Baidu, and lots of people use it from there.

But more importantly, on the home page of Mobile Baidu, we have a large microphone button that enables people to talk to Mobile Baidu and get the search results, both in text and in speech.

And that has grown very dramatically, over the past couple of quarters because of the accuracy of our speech recognition.

And we believe that this will continue to trend up, in the future.

Wendy Huang, Macquarie.

Thank you.

My question is mainly on the O2O.

You reported RMB16b GMV for this quarter.

And I recall last quarter, it was actually close to RMB15b.

It seems a small incremental increase quarter over quarter.

So I just wonder if you are seeing any actual competitive landscape change that resulted in this kind of small addition, sequentially.

And also, you mentioned about some new business model you're adopting for Nuomi, in your prepared remark.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

How would this actually affect the net take rate, and also the O2O revenue in the near term?

Thank you.

Hi, Wendy.

The GMV did sequentially increase.

As we mentioned earlier, our focus to provide the transaction services is really an integrated approach.

I think on the front of the O2O transaction per se, the business -- the GMV is growing healthily and solidly.

We also mentioned earlier that we note that our market share for the O2O service is expanding, so we're pleased with the results that we're accomplishing.

And of course, at the same time, we're executing on the O2O strategy, building the momentum, building quality, and focusing on returns of the promotional activities we put in.

So the GMV number I think reflects a solid progress.

And regarding to the take rate, I think for the existing core Nuomi services, such as dining, and hotel, and movie tickets, we will continue enforce the take rate, but for the newer verticals, especially for those high-ticket, lower-frequency ones, we think advertising model is a better one.

Ming Zhao, 86Research.

Hi, good morning.

This is Juan Lin on behalf of Ming.

So I have two questions related to O2O.

First, you recently announced a zero commission policy for merchants of many verticals on Nuomi.

And I'm wondering whether you will extend the policy to the core O2O categories, such as dining and movie tickets, or at least lower the commission rate, to keep competitive, and whether such policy will impact your monetization plan for O2O.

And also, does it mean that your O2O strategy is now transitioning, from subsidizing consumers, to more focus on recruiting merchants?

And the second question is about O2O monetization.

I'm wondering, what is the current advertising model for Nuomi, Takeout Delivery, and Baidu, whether you have adopted bidding system for all your O2O assets, and if not, whether you will launch bidding system on O2O in the near future.

Thank you.

Hi.

We just commented on the take rate.

I think for some of the basic services, high frequency, those take rate arrangements have been established.

But we are expanding our verticals to cover more of the O2O services.

Because of the powerful integrated platform approach that we're taking, Baidu does have different angles to service our merchants and work with them.

And so for the other ones that we do not intend or plan to take on take rates, and there are other ways that our merchants can work with us to promote their business.

So the overall value proposition that Baidu really works with merchants sets us apart from other O2O players.

And so I think for us to continue to expand further into wider coverage of the O2O services, we do have multiple tools to work with the merchants.

Yes, just to add, Local Express is the short answer for O2O monetization, in addition to take rate.

For some of the core verticals, take rate will continue to be there, but for others, Local Express is a better way to monetize, and not only through Nuomi's own platform, but through the overall Baidu platform, including Mobile Baidu and Baidu Maps.

And FOR the Local Express it's a bidding system.

Robert Lin, Morgan Stanley.

Hi, management.

Thanks for taking my questions.

I guess in terms of net customer add, we saw the 32,000.

It's higher than last quarter, so quarter-on-quarter add.

Can we split what the contribution was from Local Express?

And I guess that's an ex-Qunar number.

The second question, I think recently there was an announcement that we are doing cooperation with Alibaba, in terms of Olympics advertising, obviously benefitting both parties.

It's one, big significant announcement for the two companies.

Can we talk about what the format and channels that we're doing these joint marketing efforts for?

Thank you.

We did have a net -- a very strong net add of customer base, over the past quarter.

Part of that is a result of the launch of the Local Express.

We do have many, as we mentioned, about 200,000 customers sign up with us.

And we launched the product in Q4 of last year, and continue to refine the product.

So as you see, when we account for online active customers, these are customers that spent with us during the past quarter.

And so I would say, as you see the net add, because of these customers taking Local Express, because they take advantage of the product, they start spending with Baidu.

And they would be counted as the online marketing active customers.

We have many people signed up with us.

And that really demonstrates the potential of the base of customers that could really take advantage of the product.

And we'll continue to refine the product and drive further growth of Local Express.

And Olympics is the perfect event for online marketing.

And we fully take advantage of this, and started early to work with many of our partners and customers.

And Alibaba, of course, is one of the more important partner and customers for us.

We work with them and try to drive traffic to them, through this kind of event.

Piyush Mubayi, Goldman Sachs.

Thank you.

A question for Jennifer.

Jennifer, would you be able to shed color on the SG&A plan for 2016, in terms of what is allocated for user acquisition spending on the logistics network, for example?

Also, when you refer to the variability of SG&A on a sequential basis through 2016, what are the events you refer to?

And again, related to SG&A and the ROI of this spend, are there any early data points in customer retention, etc., that you could share with us?

Thank you.

As I mentioned last quarter, we provided some colors and insights into how you should expect the SG&A expense to shape for the 2016.

And that guidance continues to hold.

Namely, we really started to kick off our transaction services efforts in the second half of last year.

And we expect that would be the kind of norm momentum, for us to continue to invest in this sector.

Most of the investment on SG&A would go to customer acquisition, promotional events, and cross-selling opportunities, getting users to really take advantage and use the new vertical areas that we are developing.

And so these are a variety of activities.

And sometimes we can take advantage of holidays to kick off campaigns or take advantage of certain product offerings, to promote specific verticals.

And for certain cities, we might focus on regional buildup of market positions.

So whether it's vertical or regional, or regional, these would be where the promotional money would go to.

We do have closer tracking of the data, and continue to learn from our experience.

We have ROI targets for longer range, and for every campaign.

And the team focus very much on ensuring that, one, we continue to improve on the returns and customer retentions as we carry out these activities, and also how we really enhance value proposition to our merchants and users, building more personalized--building on the data and the technology, and building a more personalized service to these people that we serve.

So O2O will continue to be an investment -- a significant investment area for us.

But I think we're building great momentum, and we'll continue on the positive trend.

Natalie Wu, CICC.

Hi, good morning, management.

And thanks for taking my questions.

Regarding O2O business and AI distinctly ramping, which part do you think will be granted with largest spending budget in three years to come, Nuomi or AI?

And also, could management elaborate on the top-five categories in terms of your advertisers?

Do you expect any structural change this year, or a typical category to outgrow or under-grow, the healthcare, e-commerce, etc.?

Thank you.

I think both -- we are right in the middle of the investment for O2O, and we also mentioned we see great future for autonomous driving, taking advantage of our technology accumulation over the years.

O2O is an important strategic area, and we will continue on that path to build.

The driverless, autonomous cars is in its early stage.

The team is testing, making technology improvements, and making great progress.

I think when the team hits certain milestones over time, budgets might go up.

But I think at this time, autonomous car driving is more longer term, down the time, from a horizon perspective, and O2O is right -- I think we're right in the middle of it.

So I think both fronts are strategically important areas, and both areas carry significant potential, just for simply from a business perspective, disruptive opportunities that they create.

So it's difficult to pin down the exact, but I think one is more near term, one is longer term, and both are important.

For the top verticals, we mentioned last quarter, as we look at the macro developments and how Baidu, as a powerful platform, penetrating into the various sectors in the economy, we do see very solid strength in the consumer and service verticals.

And so if we roll up some of the sub-verticals, we continue to see local services, retail, medical services, education, and even financial services as our top sectors.

Thomas Chong, Citigroup.

Thanks for taking my questions.

I have two quick questions.

First is about the recent move into the PGC area in online video.

So, should we think about Baidu doing it independently, or will it be integrated into iQiyi in the future?

And the second question is about Other Revenue.

Given the fact that the paid subscription is on the rise, any color why it drops, on a Q-on-Q basis?

Thanks.

So on your first question, iQiyi has PGC content, and the recently spun off Baidu Video will focus on PGC too.

I think video is a very large and fast-growing sector.

Baidu overall, we will try to address all kinds of different needs and different content format, through various Baidu products and offerings.

And for other revenue, yes, you are right, our subscription base continues to grow.

And the revenue generated from subscription fees continue to rise.

What's included in other services -- other revenues are all the non-online marketing-related services.

So these include other user paid services and also includes, for example, content exchange or content sales of iQiyi's business that would be recorded as revenue.

And for those kind of other items, they do move around.

But I think there is no worry, really, on the subscription-based revenue.

It does continue to grow.

Alan Hellawell, Deutsche Bank.

Yes, hi.

Questions about Baidu Wallet.

I was just wondering how we might want to conceptualize the margin profile of the emerging payments business.

I know Jennifer mentioned rising operational costs attributable to transactions.

Can you specify what the impact might be?

I'm also curious as to what percent of Baidu Wallet GMV might be non-Baidu O2O.

And could you characterize the frequency of use by the Baidu Wallet user.

And then finally, just would love to get an update on the proposed management buyout of iQiyi, what approvals may still be required, and what timeline we might want to consider.

Thank you.

I think the Baidu Wallet user base continued to grow.

And we do take advantage of the consumption scenarios that happen on the Baidu platform.

And the majority of the transactions on Baidu Nuomi and a growing part of other services are using the Baidu Wallet.

So, the Baidu Wallet is really built on top of the Baidu consumption scenario, and help us build the data, the closed loop services for our customers.

Within operating costs are related transaction services expenses, going up.

Part of that is, of course, the transaction for payments.

There are also other operating costs, like customer service, ground troops that are helping to do the promotion.

So doing wallet, the payment fee is part of the cost.

But I think for us, we're building it majority within the Baidu umbrella.

And that is valuable data for us, as we build ancillary business and financial services in particular.

Those kind of data are valuable.

With regards to your question on the management buyout for iQiyi, we do have a special committee that continues to work with the financial advisor, as well as external legal counsels, to assess the strategic options, and also the various details related to the transaction.

I think it's really up in the special committee's hands to make a decision and make assessments.

To the extent we do have progress information that we're ready to share, we'll make it available to the investment community.

Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer.

Thank you for taking my question.

This is Bo, speaking for Jason.

So basically I have two question.

Number one, I just want to follow up a bit on the gross margin.

So the gross margin coming a little bit lower than expected, pretty much weighed by the increasing investment on iQiyi and also the increasing TAC.

So just wondering if management can comment a bit on the rationale.

How should we look at a long-term trend over there?

And second question, just want to reconcile a bit on the R&D expenses and your budgeting throughout the year, given that even on an apple-to-apple basis, the expenses barely grew.

So, just trying to understand how should we look at that, as well?

On the gross margin, a couple of moving items that I provided some indication, how you should expect the parts to move around the last quarter.

And I think the ones that would move more meaningfully, materially are operational costs and content costs.

Operational costs relate to a lot of the cost for transaction services, as I mentioned earlier.

And content cost is almost all related to iQiyi's investment in content.

And for operational cost, I mentioned last time that last year, in 2015, you would note that increased by 75%, and we expect that to increase in similar pace, very aggressively, maybe slightly moderately.

Same thing for content cost.

I think within gross margin, an infrastructure buildup would have some impact on bandwidth costs.

And as we grow the contextual business, TAC with traffic acquisition costs as a percent of revenue might also edge up.

And so I think these are all within our plan and targets.

And these trends should have already past references that you can look at.

For R&D expenses, on the Q1 year-over-year comparison, there is a slight increase, excluding Qunar.

You will recall that in the second half of last year, and particularly in Q4, we slowed down in our hiring.

We tried to realign the efforts to the internal realignments, to make sure our workforce is put in the best place for efficiency and productivity.

And so that, as you see in Q1, might have some reflection in that.

But having said that, R&D has been a consistent investment area for us.

And as we talk about building the technology capabilities for autonomous driving -- and recently, you do see that we announced that we're building the teams in both the US and China, we will continue to invest in R&D capabilities.

Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray.

Good morning.

Just a follow-up question for Robin, on the autonomous cars, just to -- so we fully understand.

Is the goal to create -- basically use a lot of Baidu Maps to improve the experience in China?

Or is this an opportunity that you could export outside of China?

Thanks.

Yes, I think, from a technology point of view, it's universal.

It should -- if it works in China, it should work elsewhere in the world.

Actually, China actually probably has the worst traffic situation and the most complicated situation that we need to handle.

So right now we are spending most of our time and effort on the China market.

And we also have testing cars in Silicon Valley, too.

Like I mentioned before, I think this is still in the early stage.

We're focusing on pretty much technology itself.

And later on, we will worry about the business model and which market to target.

Jin Yoon, Mizuho.

Hey, good morning, guys.

I apologize if this question has been asked before.

I got on the call a little bit late.

How much of your search revenues is O2O driven, given the fact that Nuomi is pretty important to search?

And going forward, is there a possibility that we may actually see kind of the O2O being -- advertising being priced on a CPC model or a transaction model?

Thanks, guys.

Yes, I think it's not a good idea to separate revenue contribution from O2O because we view this as the integral part.

O2O is just trying to satisfy the user needs.

We try to connect people with information and connect people with services too.

And O2O is one of the most important sectors for services.

Right now, O2O has both the CPC model and the transaction or take-rate model.

But direct revenue contribution for search is still minimal.

It sort of function more like a user feature that helps to attract user to the Baidu platform.

They rely on us for everything, from information to services.

To give you a better color, about 10% of our search queries is related to local services.

And about 40% of the queries on maps is related to local services.

So this is a very significant part of user demand.

And we try to satisfy that first, and worry about revenue later.

Alex Liu, Daiwa.

Hi.

Good morning.

Thanks for taking my questions.

I just want to ask Robin, I think from a high level, basically, what do you think about the search market, going forward, in China?

I think specifically, for the search advertising as a format, comparing to other formats of advertising, for example, the social ads format, and the feed ads, and native ads formats.

So I think mobile is now already 60% of the total revenue.

What do you think about mobile search ramp-up, specifically in the next one to two years?

Thanks.

Yes, we've been in the search business for many, many years.

And it's always pretty much traffic bound.

Customers or advertisers can never buy enough amount of traffic for search because the ROIs, the performance for them is so good.

They always want more traffic from us.

So to Baidu, we try our best, we try very hard to satisfy users' needs, so that users continue to depend on us to find information, to find services.

So I think the business model for search will continue to be pretty much on a marketing dollar basis.

And it's just way better than any other advertising format available on the Internet, or off the Internet, for that matter.

Our focus is really to provide the best user experience, through technology, through product innovation.

And you will see that the mobile search is very different from PC search right now, and will continue to evolve, over the next one to three years.

Eric Wen, Blue Lotus.

Thanks to management for taking my questions, Robin, Jennifer, and Sharon.

I have some additional questions on Local Express.

You mentioned about the customer adds.

What does the revenue per customer look like, comparing to your traditional search customers?

And how big is its growth potential, in terms of CTR, CPC, and the coverage ratio?

And lastly, if you can elaborate how much revenue contribution do you expect in this year, for Local Express?

That will be very helpful.

Thanks.

Yes, Eric, we launched Local Express last quarter.

And many customers sign up.

These customers are Nuomi customers or existing Phoenix Nest customers, as well as new customer who sign up.

Basically, and I think the beauty of that is since with mobile and with more targeted locations, local traffic can be better monetized and serve the merchants as well.

These are typically, compared to the Phoenix Nest customers, are much smaller merchants.

And I think their ad budgets, as a result, is not as high as the traditional search customers that you would have seen.

And so I think we're in the early stage to monetize and help these merchants to take advantage of the products.

Revenue contribution from Local Express is still small.

But I think, given the customer base and the enthusiasm that we see, I think this is a product that will bear a lot of potential.

Early to say what the CPC, CTR would be.

I think we'll continue to refine the products and also educate the customers to use the products.

Over time, we think it is going to be a very valuable product, for both us, as well as the merchants, because they do have multiple ways to promote their products and services, and possibly not only through search, but also through many other gateways within the Nuomi platform and within the map gateways as well.

So I think for Local Express, it's really early.

But I think we will work hard, and it bears a lot of potential.

We are now approaching the end of the conference call.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference.

This concludes the presentation.

You may now disconnect.

Good day.