Google Looks To Be Already Out Of China (GOOG, BIDU)

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been on its way out of China for some time.  The search engine leader has said it was reconsidering its China stance, but the damage has been done and the effort to rectify its stance seems insurmountable regardless of what the company and regardless of what the Chinese government says.  Last week came the reports that we’d hear from Google very soon, as soon as Monday (ergo Today), about Google’s decision.  As we were posting this a post on the Official Google blog is addressing this notion.

It turns out that Google may have already left China.  Go to Google.cn and it redirects you to Google.com/hk for its Hong Kong site.  This is the case on Mozilla’s Firefox, Internet Explorer, and even in Safari.

Baidu may see a “sell the news” impact as we saw briefly.  Shares are up 1% at $575.75 but shares had been up as much as $585.79 today.   This stock has risen sharply since Google first announced its war on Chinese censorship.  Shares were under $400.00 back when the issue first came up in January…. close to a 50% gain.

Hong Kong is its own independent business zone, but for whatever it is worth the ownership of Hong Kong did revert back to China more than a decade ago.  If mainland China does not want to deal with Google, Hong Kong won’t be a safe haven for Google to operate.

That Official Google Blog post is here to show Google’s new stance.  Google noted in the post, “So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.”

JON C. OGG