China's Baidu.com says profit up 44.6 percent

BEIJING — Baidu Inc., which operates China's leading Internet search engine, said Friday its quarterly profit rose 44.6 percent from a year earlier on strong growth in revenue and numbers of advertisers.

Net income for the three months ending June 30 was 383.3 million yuan ($56.1 million), or 11.02 yuan ($1.61) per share, the Beijing-based company said. Revenue rose 36.7 percent from a year earlier to just under 1.1 billion yuan ($160.7 million).

"Our focus on execution drove another strong quarter for Baidu," Robin Li, Baidu's chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

Consumer-oriented companies such as Baidu have seen business rebound as Beijing's 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) economic stimulus pumps money into the economy and helped to boost retail spending.

The number of active online marketing customers rose to 203,000, up 12.2 percent from a year earlier and 9.7 percent from the previous quarter, Baidu said. It said revenue per online marketing customer rose 22.7 percent from the same period of 2008.

China has the world's biggest population of Internet users, with 338 million people online by the end of June, though its market is still smaller in financial terms that those of the United States, South Korea and some other countries.

Baidu forecast revenue of 1.2 billion to 1.3 billion yuan ($184 million to $189 million) for the next quarter, a 15 to 18 percent increase over a year earlier.

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Baidu Inc.: www.baidu.com