Baidu rattled by departure of senior executive
BEIJING: The departure of Baidu Inc’s most senior operational executive threatens to derail the Chinese search giant’s ambition of placing artificial intelligence at the heart of its business.
Last Friday, the company stunned investors with the revelation that Microsoft Corp veteran Qi Lu – hired just over a year ago to accelerate its drive into everything from autonomous cars to digital assistants -- was stepping down because he could no longer work fulltime in China for personal reasons.
His departure triggered a 9.5% plummet in Baidu’s share price, the biggest fall in almost three years, on fears its revival had been cut short.
Credit Suisse Group AG became among the first to raise a warning flag when it downgraded the stock.
Lu arrived in early 2017, a signature hire for a company then struggling to recover from a major healthcare ad scandal that provoked a government crackdown.
To get the company back on track and focused on core technology, he presided over the sale or spin-off of cash-burning business- es such as food delivery unit Waimai and the Netflix-like iQiyi Inc, greatly expanded its Apollo self-driving car platform and even ushered in crowd-pleasing gadgets such as Baidu’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa. His unexpected departure, just a year after losing widely respected chief scientist Andrew Ng to Silicon Valley, now casts doubt over its ability to attract the high-wattage talent it needs to compete.