Baidu foresees rising costs as competition heats up

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, will increase marketing expenditures for the rest of the year to counter competition from rival Qihoo 360 Technology, which may further put the brakes on profit growth.

Baidu posted on Friday its slowest quarterly profit growth since end-September 2008, citing a rise in traffic acquisition costs, or what a search engine pays to partner websites and software applications to show its search box or results.

via Business feed http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1223732/baidu-foresees-rising-costs-competition-heats