Lex专栏：百度与中国搜索市场

If China’s economy has slowed, one would not know it from a quick glance at the performance of Baidu. Revenues at the country’s biggest internet search engine by share of advertising sales were up 60 per cent from a year earlier in the second quarter – net income was 70 per cent higher. More of that is forecast for the next three months.

中国经济增长固然放缓了，但你不会从百度(Baidu)的业绩中发现这一迹象。以广告销售收入的市场份额计算，百度是中国最大的网络搜索引擎，其第二季度营收同比增长了60%，净利润增长了70%。预计未来三个月还将更高。

Notably, small and medium-sized enterprises – one of China’s most beleaguered sectors – is driving that growth. Baidu added 31,000 advertising customers over the quarter, most of them SMEs. After all, more targeted search advertising is a good use of marketing budgets shrinking under slowing exports and rising labour costs.

值得注意的是，中小型企业——中国处境最困难的部门之一——推动了百度的增长。百度在过去一个季度新增广告客户3.1万个，其中大部分是中小型企业。毕竟，随着出口减慢和劳动力成本上涨，企业的营销预算有所收缩，因此做更多的针对性搜索广告可以更加有效地利用这些预算。

Still, there are signs that margin pressure is growing for Baidu. The fact that the search giant is tapping China’s smaller cities to support much of its customer growth translates into smaller advertising budgets. Ad spend per customer picked up by a third from a year earlier last quarter, but this was the lowest growth since the start of 2010.

然而，也有迹象表明百度面临日益增长的利润率压力。百度正在开发中国较小城市的市场，以支持其大部分的客户增长，这一事实意味着其客户的广告预算有所降低。上季度，每个客户的广告支出同比增长三分之一，但这是自2010年初以来的最低增长率。

A bigger challenge to margins is mobile internet search, which has surpassed desktop search for the first time. Even upbeat estimates show that Baidu holds half of the mobile search market, compared with its four-fifths share of desktop search. Ad revenues at the former are lower since browsing on a mobile is less likely to result in a purchase. Google can sympathise – the shift to mobile search has been accompanied by a fall in cost-per-click to advertisers.

利润率面临的更大挑战是移动网络搜索，它第一次超过了桌面搜索。即使根据乐观的估计，百度也只占移动搜索市场的一半，相比之下其桌面搜索占据了五分之四的市场份额。移动搜索的广告收入较低，因为手机浏览不大可能会促成直接购买。谷歌(Google)对此也有同感——随着移动搜索越来越流行，广告商的单次点击成本下降了。

Baidu trades on 19 times forward earnings, a 40 per cent premium to Google. That might be justified for now – search advertising expenditure is growing four times faster in China than the global average. Google’s retreat to Hong Kong in 2010 means Baidu is still in the best place to capture that. But gone are the days when that growth came hand in hand with fat margins.

百度目前的预期市盈率为19倍，相对于谷歌溢价40%。现在看来这也许还算合理——中国的搜索广告支出增速是全球平均值的四倍。谷歌2010年退至香港，意味着百度仍具有最大的优势来赚取这些广告收入，但是从中获取丰厚利润的日子却一去不复返了。

Lex专栏是由FT评论家联合撰写的短评，对全球经济与商业进行精辟分析