China, with a population closing in on 1.5 billion people can be an incredibly lucrative location for an IT company looking to enter its market. Google, one of the world's most popular search engines threatened to stop it's search service in the country on Monday February 1st after the company was the target of repeated cyber attacks throughout the month of January. This can only mean more good news for Bai-Du, the Chinese search giant.
Shares of Bai-Du have risen 3.7 percent to $426.83 in afternoon trading in the wake of Google's threat to stop it's search service. Google is laying down the pressure for the Chinese Government to ease up on it's censoring of search results. Currently anything deemed subversive or pornographic will be filtered out and diverted away from the search user.
In this ABC News article Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung wrote that "he expects Google and China to resolve the matter, but that the uncertainty means as much as a third of Google's Chinese search advertising revenue ultimately could go to Baidu instead."
So, while, there is no doubt that Google would like to increase its presence in a market with such economic potential, today, the possibility of Google leaving China is increasing rather than decreasing. In a recent MarketWatch article, we learn that there may be some good news for Google after all. The article chronicles how Google and China are expected to resolve the issue in an "amicable" manner, and that Google may yet maintain a sales team in China "to sell both Chinese and non-Chinese keywords. At this point, i suppose time will tell.