BIDU

[ric]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BIDU&d=t

WHOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAWHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!


I made a nice bundle of cash!

Watch out GOOGLE! :lol: :shock: :D 8)

[Infectious]

I didn't know that dotcoms other than google did that anymore.

Um, sell your stock quickly?

[ric]

Huge Pop for Baidu.com

By Nat Worden
TheStreet.com Staff Reporter
8/5/2005 3:48 PM EDT

Updated from noon EDT

Wall Street caught an Asian strain of IPO fever Friday after Beijing buzz magnet Baidu.com (BIDU:Nasdaq - commentary - research) priced 4 million initial shares above the expected range.

The stock, which benefited greatly from its small float, opened at $66 just before noon and has since gone as high as $151.21. Trading volume is more than five times the number of shares available.

"Its giving me bubble flashbacks," says Randy Diamond, sales trader at Miller Tabak. "It makes me feel especially uncomfortable now that the market is acting toppy."

The American depositary shares were sold by underwriters for $27 apiece late Thursday, above the high end of its once-raised price talk of $25. About 3.2 million of the shares were sold by the company, which will use the money for tech development and general purposes.

Friday's debut is the best for any initial public offering since late 1999.

Baidu, a search engine that is occasionally billed as the Chinese Google (GOOG:Nasdaq - commentary - research), raised $109 million in the deal, which was led by Goldman Sachs, CSFB and Piper Jaffray. The IPO price values Baidu at around $870 million.

As the Chinese counterpart to Google (which owns 2.6% of the stock), Baidu.com is being compared to one of the hottest Wall Street IPOs of the last half-decade. Its revenue is only a fraction of Google's, but it has shown impressive growth in recent years, posting $4.5 million in operating cash flow in 2004 after breaking even the previous year.

Still, the company's overall market cap (not including the after-market pop) was about 193 times the operating cash flow figure.

Baidu will make its Wall Street debut at a time when Chinese companies have become a lightning rod in U.S. financial markets and political circles. The Chinese government's recent revaluation of its currency followed a couple of attempts by Chinese companies to acquire U.S. assets, including the controversial bid for Unocal (UCL:NYSE - commentary - research).

Meanwhile, the fast-growing Chinese economy has long been viewed as a new frontier for U.S. multinational corporations looking to find emerging markets, such as Wal-Mart (WMT:NYSE - commentary - research) and Starbucks (SBUX:NYSE - commentary - research).

With about 20 Chinese companies having listed on the Nasdaq since 2000, only about three Chinese IPOs have taken place in 2005, including Hurray (HRAY:Nasdaq - commentary - research), China Techfaith (CNTF:Nasdaq - commentary - research) and Focus Media (FMCN:NYSE - commentary - research).

Other Chinese companies with popular stocks trading on the Nasdaq include Sina.com (SINA:Nasdaq - commentary - research) and Sohu.com (SOHU:Nasdaq - commentary - research).

[ric]

Real Money' Radio Wrap-Up: Don't Buy the Baidu Hype

By TheStreet.com Staff
8/5/2005 3:25 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by TheStreet.com Staff

Everybody -- except Cramer -- is buzzing about Baidu.com (BIDU:Nasdaq - commentary - research).

Cramer told listeners on his "RealMoney" radio show Friday to ring the register "big time" if they were lucky enough to own Baidu, the Chinese Internet company that more than quadrupled since being priced at $27 a share.

"It's absurd that it's up 80 points after being priced today. It's positively 1999 and it's bad for the business," says Cramer.

Part of the reason for the stock's pop is that only 4 million shares were offered to the public, causing a significant squeeze when retail investors started piling in. Cramer said the bankers that structured the deal eventually will face investor wrath "because this stock will eventually implode."

Cramer's other reason for disliking the stock is the comparisons to Google (GOOG:Nasdaq - commentary - research), a long-time Cramer fave. Cramer said that Google may have been underpriced last year when it went public, but it has proven to be a huge earnings grower. The same cannot be said for Baidu, which already trades at a multiple far greater than Google.

Cramer advised listeners feeling compelled to take the "Red Chinese Internet plunge" to buy shares of NetEase (NTES:Nasdaq - commentary - research), Sohu.com (SOHU:Nasdaq - commentary - research) and even eBay (EBAY:Nasdaq - commentary - research) instead.

Cramer said he doesn't mind expensive stocks, but he can't come up with an estimate that makes Baidu cheap. "I know people made a killing on Google. But Internet companies do not grow to the sky. And this is something that should have already been learned."

"I'm going to sit this one out. I don't want to be linked to Baidu. If you own it and you are speculating, then ring the register."

[ric]

I didn't know that dotcoms other than google did that anymore.

Um, sell your stock quickly?

Get in man

I don't see this going out of control like google, but stock won't crash

It sits at 128.40

I say it will hit 190s before leveling off. I mean you got to have a search engine that can handle chinese. Not sure how ranking/indexing would be done on that

[ric]

BAIDU.COM, INC. (NasdaqNM:BIDU)
Last Trade: 124.13
Trade Time: 3:54PM ET
Change: Up 97.13 (359.74%)
Prev Close: 27.00
Open: 66.00
Bid: 124.09 x 100
Ask: 124.51 x 200
1y Target Est: N/A

Day's Range: 60.00 - 151.21
52wk Range: N/A
Volume: 22,141,638

[DijabutiA]

Damn dude, drop that shit and laugh all the way to the bank. You can always use the profit to buy after it splits...

[wzhao553]

Has anyone here actually used the search engine?

[awong]

Has anyone here actually used the search engine?
my friend did, he found this chinese song he was looking for after he saw the concert in china. I think it has an mp3 search function. He said everyone he knew used it.

[DijabutiA]

Has anyone here actually used the search engine?
my friend did, he found this chinese song he was looking for after he saw the concert in china. I think it has an mp3 search function. He said everyone he knew used it.

So does it find the WAREZ? and Pr0n??!?!??!

[wzhao553]

Has anyone here actually used the search engine?
my friend did, he found this chinese song he was looking for after he saw the concert in china. I think it has an mp3 search function. He said everyone he knew used it.

So does it find the WAREZ? and Pr0n??!?!??!

I'm pretty sure the Pr0n ain't there. But yes, in my experience, Baidu seems to be great for finding Chinese music.

[ric]

LAST TRADE 11:13 am 145.48
CHANGE 18.72% 22.94

[ric]

China Search Engine Baidu.com Set for IPO


BEIJING - Baidu.com takes its name from a 900-year-old poem but its ambitions are ultramodern ó to become the Chinese-language equivalent of Internet search giant Google Inc.


Little known abroad, 5-year-old Baidu.com says it already is the world's sixth most-visited Internet site, thanks to a strong following from China's 100 million-plus Web surfers.

Now the startup founded by two Chinese veterans of American tech firms is preparing to follow Google's example with an initial public offering in the United States, hoping to raise $45 million.

Baidu.com is in the front ranks of an emerging group of Chinese companies that are trying to create Internet services uniquely suited to their country's ideogram-based language and the political restrictions of its communist government

"Here's a homegrown company that has created what really is a very strong search product," said David Wolf, managing director of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing consulting firm.

Baidu.com was founded in 2000 by Robin Li, who earned a master's degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked for U.S. search engine firm Infoseek, and Eric Xu, a Ph.D. from Texas A&M and a veteran of American biotech firms. Xu later left the company.

The name ó pronounced "by doo" ó means "one hundred times." It comes from a Song dynasty poem and refers to a man ardently searching for his lover in a festival crowd.

Google bought 2.6 percent of Baidu.com last year in a move that outsiders thought might lead to the American giant taking over the tiny Chinese startup. But Baidu.com has stayed independent.

Google's influence shows, though, in Baidu.com's spare white site that is nearly identical to the American firm's.

By contrast, competitor 3721.com ó bought in 2003 by U.S.-based Yahoo! ó is a busier, colorful site with animated graphics.

Other early backers were U.S.-based venture capital firms including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and the investment arm of International Data Group. Draper Fisher is Baidu.com's biggest single shareholder, with a 28 percent stake.

Baidu.com's planned IPO is modest beside the $1.2 billion that Google's public offering raised last August. But its tentative price for the block of shares being offered values the whole Chinese company at $650 million. No date has been announced for the IPO.

The company says it already makes money ó some $303,000 in the three months that ended on March 31.

China's communist government promotes Internet use for business and education. But it also has launched the world's most sweeping effort to police what its people can see online, blocking access to material deemed subversive or pornographic.

The extent of the censorship controls has been highlighted by the changes that foreign companies have made when they launch Chinese versions of commonly used services.

Free-speech activists criticized Microsoft Corp. when the blogging section of its recently launched China-based Web portal rejected such words as democracy, freedom and human rights, labeling them "forbidden language."

Google has also taken heat for blocking access to material that Chinese leaders dislike. A search on Google's China-based service for such topics as Taiwan, the Dalai Lama or the banned spiritual group
Falun Gong returns a message that says "site cannot be found."

And communist leaders, early believers in the Internet's economic promise, seem intent on keeping foreign involvement to a minimum in order to keep the profits for China's own firms.

Baidu.com's decision to stay independent could help it with intensely nationalistic Chinese regulators, eliminating any doubts about divided loyalties, said Wolf.

"It's a company that has grown up in the Chinese system. It's going to be a favorite of a lot of partners here and an implicit favorite of the government for that reason," he said.

Internet firms with foreign partners have been challenged by regulators who demand assurances that Chinese managers will stay in place and not surrender control to outsiders.

Baidu.com, 3721.com and other Chinese search engines also face daunting linguistic challenges that designers working in English and most other languages don't.

Chinese uses thousands of ideograms. On a computer, they usually are written by typing words phonetically in Roman letters, then using special software to convert them to characters.

Making things even more complex, the mainland's communist leaders simplified many characters after the 1949 revolution, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other societies use the old system.

So a search engine must sift through twice as many characters. And Chinese is written without spaces between words, making it hard for a machine to figure out where one ends and the next begins.

Then there are the quirks of a writing system with a vast literary history, 1 billion modern users and pressure to keep up with technology and international commerce. Baidu.com's advertising notes that Chinese has 38 ways to say "I."

Financial analysts forecast fast growth but brutal competition in the industry over the next few years, leaving only a handful of competitors.

Already, Baidu.com has been through a court battle with 3721.com after accusing its rival of adding elements to its software that blocked users from reaching the Baidu.com site.

A Beijing court ruled against 3721.com in April, ordering it stop such "unfair competition."

The lawsuit "did much to reinforce Baidu's underdog image," said Wolf. "That turned out to be very positive for them in China. It made people check them out."

[wzhao553]

So it's under 100 now. Have you sold it yet, ric?

[SamuraiJack]

Thanks for letting us know AFTER the IPO. That info would have been useful before. =P