Adverts help Baidu profits surge

Baidu has gained market dominance in China

Chinese internet search engine Baidu has seen its quarterly net profits grow five-fold thanks to new users and online advertising customers.

Labelled by some as "China's Google", Baidu made 122.8m yuan ($15.7m; £8m) in the last three months of 2006, up from 24.5m yuan a year earlier.

This took net profits for 2006 as a whole to 301.8m yuan.

The firm, which boasts a 62% share of the Chinese market, announced last year that it was to expand into Japan.

It said its strength in non-English language searches and similarities between Chinese and Japanese made Japan an "ideal" next step for expansion.

Looking ahead, Baidu said it expected sales to fall slightly below market forecasts in the first quarter of 2007.

After the US, China ranks second in terms of internet market size with more than 100 million users.

Baidu said it saw a 5.9% rise in the number of advertisers from the previous quarter to 108,000.