BizChina

Chinese search engine Baidu.com announced that is plans to make a USD306 million investment in Qunar.com, a Chinese travel search engine.

The investment will make Baidu the majority shareholder of Qunar, which offers Chinese consumers real-time searches for air and rail tickets, hotels, and tour packages.

The parties currently expect that the transaction will close in the third quarter of 2011. After the investment, Qunar will continue to operate as an independent company, while both companies will cooperate in certain areas of online travel search. Baidu plans to finance the investment through obtaining a third-party loan facility.

Tencent Holdings Ltd, the world's third largest Internet firm, aims to be China's Facebook, Twitter and Google -- all rolled into one.

While the company's market value has quadrupled to $50 billion over the past 2- years, its revenue and profit growth is expected to slow over the next few years, forcing the company to rethink its future.

Tencent is aggressively diversifying away from the highly competitive online gaming industry and into China's social networking, e-commerce and mobile search engine sector.

The company, an investor darling whose mascots are a pair of chubby penguins with wraparound scarves, faces many risks, including managing its partners, content regulations and strong competition from rivals such as Baidu Inc, SINA Corp and Alibaba.com.

China's economic planner is mulling policies that would boost the development of seawater desalination facilities in order to supplement the country's supply of freshwater.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), together with 11 other departments, are working on guidelines to accelerate the development of the country's seawater desalination facilities, said Li Jing, deputy director of the Environment and Resources Department under the NDRC.

China's Ministry of Finance said Friday that the country will cut or completely eliminate tariffs on 33 commodities, ranging from fuel to textiles.

Import tariffs on gasoline and fuel oil will both be lowered to 1 percent from the previous 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively, while tariffs for diesel and aircraft fuel will be cut to zero, the ministry said in a statement on its website.

The tariff reductions, effective from July, aim to ease the country's trade imbalance and boost imports of advanced technological equipment and raw materials, the statement said.