This article was written by Aline Rzetelna, a Financial Analyst at I Know First.

BIDU Stock Forecast

“Self-driving cars is a challenge that can finally be solved with recent breakthroughs in deep learning and artificial intelligence.” – Jen-Hsun Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA

Summary:

• Baidu enters the next stage of growth in the AI era
• BIDU launches its latest version of autonomous vehicle
• I Know First bullish forecast on BIDU

Company Description: 

Baidu Inc. is a Chinese company that provides Internet search services in China and internationally. Moreover, it offers several popular community-based products such as the Baidu PostBar, a social media platform that attracts users through topics of common interest. Baidu Knows, where customers can ask and answer questions, sharing knowledge and experiences. Additionally, the company offers Baidu Encyclopedia, Baidu WenKu, an online document sharing platform and several others. With its culture based on simplicity and reliability, Baidu is one of the premier artificial intelligence leaders and one of the largest internet companies in the world. Baidu was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Beijing, China.

Baidu Announce New CFO 

The Chinese tech giant Baidu hired a new chief financial officer. Replacing the long-serving Jennifer Li, who will still remain as a chief executive in Baidu’s private equity and as a senior advisor to Baidu’s top management is Herman Yu.  Yu arrives in a new stage of growth focused on artificial intelligence. He has already served as CFO of US-listed internet companies for 10 years and has held management roles at high tech companies in the US and China.

Baidu is trying to recover from the scandal which hit the company’s profits after a regulatory investigation. The new CFO arrived focusing on the new business model based on artificial intelligence. An example of this new focus is the transition from NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture based systems to the greater and faster Volta-based platforms. Then, BIDU subsequently saw its shares boost, with its fortune rebounding.

Baidu Launches Apollo Fund and Apollo 1.5 

Baidu announced a $1.5 billion fund to invest in 100 autonomous driving projects over the next three years. Called the Apollo Fund, its main goal is to speed up its technical development and to compete with US rivals such as Tesla Inc and Google project Waymo. In order to achieve these goals, Baidu decided to open its autonomous driving technology to third parties, after years of internal development. They quickly gathered 70 strong partners, including Hyundai, Microsoft, Ford, Intel and Nvidia.

The fund’s launch coincides with the release of Baidu’s second version of the Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform, Apollo 1.5. This latest version of the artificial intelligence technology includes five additional core capabilities: obstacle perception, which enables vehicles to accurately identify obstacles surrounding the vehicle during day and night, planning, that allows vehicles to plan correct driving paths and to optimize driving decisions, cloud simulation, which provides HD maps for autonomous driving, high-definition (HD) maps and end-to-end deep learning. The Apollo project aims to create completely autonomous cars and possibly will be ready in China by 2020.

I Know First Bullish Forecast

I Know First remains bullish on BIDU. For the 1-year period, the algorithm has a signal strength of 233.15 and a predictability of 0.52. The new era focused on artificial intelligence might drive Baidu into this optimistic scenario.

Past I Know First Forecast Successes with BIDU

I Know First has made accurate predictions on Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:BIDU) in the past, such as its bullish prediction that was published on September 27th, 2016. In this prediction, BIDU was assigned a signal strength of 356.69 and a predictability factor of 0.47 for a 1 year period (September 27th, 2016 – September 27th, 2017). Since then, BIDU shares rose 27.38% in line with the I Know First algorithm’s forecast. See chart below.

I Know First Algorithm Heatmap Explanation

The sign of the signal tells in which direction the asset price is expected to go (positive = to go up = Long, negative = to drop = Short position), the signal strength is related to the magnitude of the expected return and is used for ranking purposes of the investment opportunities.

Predictability is the actual fitness function being optimized every day, and can be simplified explained as the correlation based quality measure of the signal. This is a unique indicator of the I Know First algorithm. This allows users to separate and focus on the most predictable assets according to the algorithm. Ranging between -1 and 1, one should focus on predictability levels significantly above 0 in order to fill confident about/trust the signal.