$8.6 billion
Data source: Yahoo! Finance, SEC filings.
Both of these companies are on very solid footing. It's important to keep in mind that Amazon is currently valued at roughly six times the size of Baidu.
Taking this into consideration, it's pretty clear that if forced to choose a more robust company, we'd have to side with Baidu. The company's cash-to-debt ratio is more favorable, and it brings in more income and free cash flow (FCF) -- relative to its size -- than Amazon.
Winner = Baidu
Sustainable competitive advantages
Commonly referred to as a "moat" in investing circles, a company's sustainable competitive advantages are what truly set it apart from the rest of the field. Over time, this has emerged as the most important predictive metric in my own investments. And both of these companies have enviable moats.
Baidu benefits from massive search engine market share in China. Currently, it has twice as much mobile search market share as the next closest competitor, and it has captured an incredible 80% of all search advertising dollars.
But the lasting moat takes two forms for Baidu. The first is simply the power of the company's brand. As Baidu continues to be the default search engine for Chinese citizens, the company captures an incredible amount of data on users, which allows it to offer targeted ads that others can't match.
The second wing of the company's moat is in its online-to-offline (O2O) investments. While still in its nascent stages, this would enable Baidu to not only become engrained in the everyday life of Chinese citizens but also the businesses that serve them.
Amazon, on the other hand, benefits from a massive and expanding moat. The company has an incredible number of fulfillment centers around the world (over 100), and these multimillion-dollar centers allow the company to offer the type of convenient two-day -- or less -- delivery that no other company can match.
Additionally, Amazon is benefiting from massive network effects with third-party sellers. The more these vendors sell on Amazon, the more that customers are incentivized to buy through Amazon. It's a virtuous cycle.
As a cherry on top of the moat, the sheer size of Amazon Web Services allows the company to leverage its computing capacity to offer low prices to cloud customers while reaping the benefits of profitability through scale.
While Baidu has a solid moat, Amazon's is simply more powerful.
Winner = Amazon
Valuation
Finally, we have valuation. While this isn't an exact science, there are some straightforward metrics we can consult to give us an idea of how expensive each stock is.
Company