HONG KONG (Reuters) – The Hong Kong shares of Baidu plunged on Monday, wiping $2.4 billion off its market worth, after the founding father of the Chinese language search engine big was not noticed at a uncommon assembly between President Xi Jinping and company leaders.
Xi hosted a symposium in Beijing with the nation’s high tycoons, together with Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei, though two sources informed Reuters there was no signal of Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, attending.
Baidu didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Buyers and market gamers pay shut consideration to the presence of senior executives at such key conferences, the place the absence of a company chief can set off hypothesis over an organization’s standing.
Shares of Baidu slid as a lot as 8.8% earlier than paring losses to shut down 7%. Baidu, with its market worth now at HK$252.05 billion ($32.4 billion), was the most important loser on each the Hold Seng Index and Hold Seng Tech Index.
Brokers mentioned Baidu’s shares had been weak for the reason that morning after it mentioned it might totally join its search engine to Chinese language AI start-up DeepSeek and its proprietary Ernie massive language mannequin.
“That means the corporate is dropping its edge in any case these years of taking a number one function by its growth of Ernie, suggesting the agency might must meet up with newcomers like DeepSeek,” a gross sales director at a regional brokerage mentioned, declining to be recognized as a result of sensitivity of the difficulty.
The absence of Baidu executives from the symposium may also result in hypothesis the corporate is dropping its essential place within the general market, the gross sales director added.
The assembly with Xi signalled the federal government’s assist for China’s expertise sector after years of regulatory controls as Beijing seeks to spice up financial progress and navigate more and more unsure relations with america.
For its half, Baidu has ramped up its push into AI because it seeks to scale back its reliance on promoting income from its core search engine enterprise.
The corporate was among the many first to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot in early 2023, following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Baidu has said that its present model, Ernie 4.0, matches the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4.
($1 = 7.7808 Hong Kong {dollars})
(Reporting By Anne Marie Roantree and Donny Kwok in Hong Kong and Liam Mo in Beijing)