Baidu CEO said ad sales have increased significantly since January

Sina Technology News (Beijing time on April 17) news, according to foreign media reports, Baidu (NasdaqGS: BIDU) said on Friday, the company's advertising sales have increased significantly since the end of January, because of the increase in business confidence in China.

Li Yanhong, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, said at the Boao Forum today that the Chinese economy has been recovering in recent months, prompting Baidu customers to increase advertising spending. "Data shows that confidence in many individual consumers and companies has been increasing at a very fast pace since the Spring Festival this year," he said ."

The Chinese government announced this week that the first quarter's GDP had the lowest growth rate in 17 years, but recent growth in urban fixed assets investment and industrial output showed that the Chinese economy may have bottomed out.

Previously, Baidu's advertising sales had been hit by a slowdown in China's economic growth and the government forced the company to suspend payment rankings for pharmaceutical customers.

However, according to CTR Market Research, a Market Research firm, China's advertising industry is still facing a sharp slowdown in growth. Small and medium enterprises are particularly unable to withstand economic fluctuations.

Li Yanhong said that Baidu has about 0.2 million active online marketing advertising customers, most of which have shown encouraging signs of business growth since the Spring Festival. He also said that Baidu will continue to invest in its Japanese website as planned and will not change because of the economic downturn. "for a large market like Japan, it takes several years of patience to reap the fruits ."

Baidu's fourth-quarter net profit was $42.3 million, up 40% year on year, but not as expected by Wall Street analysts. Li Yanhong said the company plans to obtain 70% of revenue from overseas markets in the next 15 years.

While Baidu wants to enter overseas markets, Google is entering the Chinese market. Last month, Google began providing free download of authorized songs in the Chinese market.

Li Yanhong said that Baidu's current focus is to better organize available network resources such as music files, rather than becoming a music information provider.

According to market research firm comScore, Baidu lags behind Google and Yahoo in the global online search market, but so far it has ranked first in the Chinese market