BizChina

China's top search engine Baidu Inc forecast revenue well ahead of Wall Street's expectations as large advertisers increased spending, sending its shares up around 7 percent.

Baidu, which has increased its focus on online video and e-commerce, has steadily grown its search market share since Google Inc curtailed its operations after a fallout with Beijing over censorship.

It was benefiting from higher income from big advertising clients in the world's largest Internet market, which helped nearly double its net profit in the second quarter to $252.6 million.

"The company is pretty confident on the longer term outlook since growth is coming from across the industries," said Dick Wei, an analyst at JPMorgan in Hong Kong.

Nissan Motor Co plans to double its automobile production in China, its biggest market, to more than 2 million units a year by the end of 2015 as it shifts its focus to emerging countries, Japan’s Nikkei business daily reported.

Nissan will maintain its Japanese output at about 1 million units a year, the Nikkei said. Nissan spokesman Christopher Keeffe declined to comment on the report, saying details of its China plans would be revealed on Tuesday at a midterm announcement.

The Japanese automaker will add assembly lines at a plant in Zhengzhou, in central China’s Henan Province, where it will build its low-priced China-only brand Venucia slated for launch in 2012, the paper said.

Policies are implemented faster in China compared to India, says a Japanese expert, who says bureaucratic hurdles and the slow pace of infrastructure development are the biggest deterrents for Indian manufacturing.

Shoji Shiba, a professor at Tsukuba University near Tokyo, said due to the nature of the government model in China, policies were implemented faster there.

"The only difference between China and India is that they (China) have a regime which passes legislations and policies quicker than in India," Shiba, an honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Technology ( IIT )) Kanpur, told IANS.

He held manufacturing-oriented workshops in association with the Confederation of Indian Industry ( CII )).

According to Shiba, the problem with progress in infrastructure was not caused by the Indian government , which is bound by democratic practices, but by bureaucratic hurdles which occur during policy implementation.

Increased use of gold in making jewellery in growing markets such as India and China has pushed up the yellow metal's prices, according to a study by Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry study based on the Dubai Multi-Commodities Centre (DMCC).

Besides, the demand for gold as reserve and hedge against inflation and investment and speculative demand for gold with the intention to profit from the continuing uptrend also contribute to the uptrend in gold prices, the study said.

The investment demand is not the only reason for the price rise of gold, higher demand for converting it into jewellery in countries like India and China, as gold plays an important role in their cultures, also led to the rise in gold prices, the report said.

The World Gold Council (WGC) estimates that jewellery and investment demand from these Asian countries represented about 40 per cent of total global demand in 2010, and that demand from India is expected to grow overtime.