$3.8b wiped from Baidu after founder misses Xi meeting
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The news: $3.8 billion was wiped from Baidu's market value on Monday, after shares in the Chinese search engine plummeted following reports that founder Robin Li did not attend a Beijing business symposium hosted by President Xi Jinping.
The numbers: Shares in Baidu fell as much as 8.8% before softening losses to close down 7% on Monday. With a market value now at HK$252.05 billion ($50.9 billion), Baidu was the biggest loser on both the Hang Seng Index and Hang Seng Tech Index.
The context: President Xi hosted a meeting with Chinese business titans as Beijing seeks to revitalise the private sector and drive economic growth. While tycoons including Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei were in attendance, Baidu founder Robin Li was not present.
The reason behind the founder’s absence remains unknown, and is likely to continue fuelling speculation that the company no longer holds as much weight in the market overall.
While Baidu has increased its push into AI, the company’s shares began their descent last week after Baidu announced it would connect its search engine and Ernie large language model to DeepSeek. Baidu also took the step of making the Ernie AI chatbot free for users to ramp up momentum, which could intensify a pricing war between generative AI platforms including Alibaba and ByteDance.
The symposium marks the first high-profile meeting with private entrepreneurs since Beijing’s crackdown on power and business influence began in 2020, notably across the tech sector. Jack Ma was very publicly targeted during the period, as the planned listing of Ant Group was quashed and the Group forced to restructure to cut the "improper" linkage between a number of Ant Group units.
The sources: Reuters, Financial Times
