By Senad Karaahmetovic

Baidu’s shares (NASDAQ:) have nearly doubled in the pre-market after it reported more than anticipated results.

Baidu reported first quarter revenue of 28.41 billion yuan, up 1% YoY and above the analyst consensus of 27.86 billion yuan. The adjusted profit per American depositary receipt was 11.22 Yuan. This is higher than the consensus estimate of 5.17 Yuan.

Baidu posted an adjusted operating profit of 4 Billion Yuan for Q1, which was higher than analysts expected at 1.1 billion. In the first quarter of 2018, Baidu reported an adjusted EBITDA (EBITDA) of 5.5 Billion Yuan, while analysts expected it to be 3.37 Billion yuan. Sixty-two million monthly active users were also recorded in this quarter. That’s higher than what analysts had expected to see at 629.4 millions.

“Since mid-March, our business has been negatively impacted by the recent COVID-19 resurgence in China,” the company commented.

Citi analyst Alicia Yap said Baidu delivered “solid and better than feared” results.

“Thanks to earlier than expected profitable quarter on operating and net profit level for iQiyi, overall Op and Np for total Baidu exceeded expectation by large margin. Separately, we view Baidu’s core revs beat at +4% yoy as solid, attributed to 45% growth in AI Cloud (in-line with our estimate) and 5% beat on online marketing revs which came at -4% yoy vs our forecast of -9% yoy,” Yap said in a note.

{{J.P. Morgan}} analyst Alex Yao praised cost control measures implemented by the Chinese company.

“Both Baidu core and iQiyi have reported better-than-expected margins driven by effective cost control measures, in our view. The key focus for investors will be on sustainability of margins in the future and its outlook on core ad revenues over the next few months. We expect the share price to react positively to the print,” the analyst wrote.