What if you bought Baidu in 2007?
World · China. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play7.9× · S&P 500 same money: $4,789
$1,000 in Baidu at the start of 2007 would be worth about $7,917 today — 7.9 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Baidu was China's Google, often more literally than it liked, dominating Chinese-language web search after a 2005 Nasdaq IPO that famously more than quadrupled on the first day. Google's partial withdrawal from mainland China in 2010 removed its main rival, and advertising revenue boomed; the shares rose roughly twentyfold from 2007 to the mid-2010s.
The problem was that the internet moved to phones, and the phone internet in China lived inside walled gardens: Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's apps did not need a search engine to find content. Baidu's reputation suffered in 2016 after the death of a student, Wei Zexi, who had sought an experimental cancer treatment advertised on the platform, prompting a regulatory crackdown on medical ads. Management bet heavily on artificial intelligence, the Apollo self-driving platform and the Apollo Go robotaxi service, and launched the Ernie chatbot in 2023, but the core ad business stagnated and newer platforms such as ByteDance's Douyin captured attention. The stock ended well below its 2015-2018 plateau.
The lesson: Owning the dominant gateway of one technology era guarantees nothing in the next; Baidu's desktop search monopoly did not carry over into the mobile app world.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | $12.00 | $7,917 | $4,789 | 7.9× |
| 2008 | $39.00 | $2,436 | $4,626 | 2.4× |
| 2010 | $41.00 | $2,317 | $6,071 | 2.3× |
| 2012 | $118 | $805 | $5,312 | 0.8× |
| 2015 | $220 | $432 | $3,301 | 0.4× |
| 2018 | $235 | $404 | $2,519 | 0.4× |
| 2020 | $130 | $731 | $2,092 | 0.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2007, turning $1,000 into $7,917. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,789.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Baidu is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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