Google’s licence to operate in China has been renewed among conjecture that there may have been issues with how the search engine had been redirecting traffic to its Hong Kong site.
Google’s legal officer, David Drummond, said:
“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”
Google has approximately 30% of the search market in China, but up until recent times was redirecting people who visited Google.cn to its Hong Kong site due to censorship issue. However, this led to a tense association with Chinese authorities which culminated in a compromise where instead of going straight to the Hong Kong site, as an alternative landed on a page where they were able to click through to it themselves. The search engine giant had at one point hinted that it might pull out of China altogether.
Google’s chief exec, Eric Schmidt, reported last week that he was confident that the licence would be updated and he has now been vindicated in that view.
It is estimated that Google make somewhere between $300m and $600m a year in China. This is but a small part of its overall £15.82bn yearly income, but there are huge predictions for growth.
