Baidu Founder Robin Li Discusses Firm’s Management and Business Problems

At the top of December, Baidu founder Robin Li held an inner livestreaming session for all staff. Compared with the sharp criticism just lately delivered by Tencent founder Pony Ma, Li’s feedback had been a lot softer, however he nonetheless identified many inner administration and enterprise issues, 36Kr reported on January 6.

During the livestream, an worker requested whether or not Li had paid consideration to Ma’s speech to Tencent, wherein he spoke in regards to the superficial reform of enterprise departments, the pursuit of excessive income, and surprising inner corruption. “Baidu also has the problems experienced by Tencent,” Li replied.

Regarding the 2 companies, Li issued a good comparability, “We don’t have a popular product like WeChat’s video channel, which has actually been the gap between us and Tencent in the past year… Our R&D intensity and R&D proportion of the total revenue are much higher than Tencent. We believe in this. Although we feel we are losing money badly now, we believe that there will be corresponding returns in the future.”

In 2022, lowering prices and rising effectivity is the theme that Chinese web corporations have collectively emphasised. “Many new businesses are losing money. After a long time, everyone feels that losing money is justified. They will not consider whether this business will make profit in three years, five years, or 100 years,” Li stated.

Li repeatedly emphasised monetary indicators, saying, “Only 20% of the income of a high-growth business comes from our self-developed products.” Later, Li stated, “We have more than 10,000 engineers, and R&D investment accounts for more than 20% of the income. But there is such a big gap between the investment and the actual performance. How many people realize this problem?” In Li’s view, gross income, working income and money stream needs to be given due consideration.

Li additionally talked about that concepts can generally be sullied at very massive corporations because of inefficient hierarchy constructions and lengthy reporting channels. He identified that when targets and actions are transmitted layer by layer within the type of OKR, issues come up.

SEE ALSO: Baidu to Launch XiRang MetaStack, Enabling Metaverse Construction in 40 Days

Li inspired Baidu staff to suppose from a better perspective. “In addition to meeting OKR, we should see if the goals have any effect on the long-term growth of the business.”

In addition, Li talked in regards to the agency’s technological progress within the AI discipline, particularly with AI-generated content material (AIGC) and ChatGPT. He stated he believed that these are new alternatives now that AI has developed to a sure extent. Previously, Baidu launched numerous AIGC-related functions, together with AI that may generate textual content and footage, in addition to convert footage into movies.

Sign up at the moment for five free articles month-to-month!