China's Baidu beats Q3 revenue estimates as ad sales recover

Nov 22 (Reuters) - Baidu Inc's (9988.HK) third-quarter revenue beat Wall Street estimates on Tuesday, as China's search engine giant benefited from a recovery in online advertising sales and growth in its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) business. Baidu, which generates most of its revenue from ads on its search engine, has seen a recovery since the second quarter, before which strict zero-COVID policies in China had led to frequent lockdowns that undermined economic activity. Baidu's revenue rose 2% to 32.54 billion yuan ($4.56 billion) in the three months to Sept. 30, beating the 31.79 billion yuan average estimate of 20 analysts, according to Refinitiv data. Baidu Core's non-online marketing revenue, an area including cloud and other AI businesses, grew by 25% year on year to 6.5 billion yuan. The company has been focusing on self-driving technologies over the past five years, as it looks to diversify its revenue sources.