Baidu's (HKG:9888) Hong Kong shares fell 6.9% from Monday's opening.
The decline comes as founder Robin Li was not seen in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Reuters reported the same day.
Xi met with business leaders, including Alibaba (HKG:9988) founder Jack Ma and Huawei's Ren Zhengfei, the report said.
Investors usually pay close attention to the attendance of senior executives at key meetings, where the absence of a leader could fuel speculation about a company's status, the report said.
Brokers said Baidu was falling since Monday morning following reports it would fully connect its search engine to DeepSeek and its own Ernie large language model, the report said.
Baidu's market cap is now at HK$251.5 billion.
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