BizChina

Ignite Media Group (www.igniteasia.com) and China Telecom are partnering in Macau and Hong Kong to enrich the article and advertiser content of China Telecom’s VIP magazine, deLight.

Of particular interest to the new partners is Guangzhou, where deLight has a circulation of 200,000. Guangzhou is a stable and growing source of travelers to Macau, and Ignite Media Group and China Telecom hope to build on this base. Ongoing economic expansion policies in the Pearl River Delta are expected to benefit the exclusive sales partnership.

deLight’s readers share the upper-end demographics and focus of the readers of an Ignite Media publication, Destination Macau, which is distributed in the rooms of all major hotels in Macau as a premium benefit for guests. deLight is distributed door to door, and this distribution pattern to customers of the world’s largest fixed-line telephone network opens the door for targeted marketing campaigns. Ignite Media Group hopes to exploit this zoning option in attracting new advertisers to the magazine.

Car sales in China dipped 0.1 percent in May from a year earlier, marking the first decline in more than two years amid a rapid slowdown in the world's biggest auto market.

After two consecutive years of frantic expansion, car sales in China settled into a subdued growth pattern at the beginning of 2011, with year-to-date sales up a mere 6.1 percent, having surged by almost two-thirds in 2010.

Japanese manufacturers, suffering from production disruptions in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami, continue to report weak China sales.

The Chinese market may continue to soften in the summer months, a traditionally slack season for car sales, followed by a moderate rebound in autumn, industry observers say.

Sina's Chinese-language Weibo product was launched about two years ago and claims more than 140 million users.

Technology blog TechWeb reported on Monday that Sina was going to launch an English microblog in the United States in a few months to rival Twitter.

Access to Twitter from within China is blocked by the Chinese government.

A worker walks past coal transportation facilities in Hami prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. China said it will increase imports of energy products, including coal, to help ease power shortage.

China will tackle an impending power shortfall by increasing energy imports, said the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the top economic planner, on Wednesday.

The nation is expected to see a serious shortage this summer, said Li Yang, director-general of the NDRC's Bureau of Economic Operations Adjustment.

"With the coming of summer, the peak time for energy consumption, and the rapid growth of industrial production, the gap between electricity demand and supply will become more obvious and some areas may face a shortfall in coal and oil supplies," the bureau said in a statement.