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BAIDU.COM has teamed up with Huawei Technologies and Intel to strengthen its servers and search technologies to expand its lead in the domestic market over rivals including Google, Nasdaq-listed Baidu said yesterday. Baidu announced it will build a joint lab with Huawei to explore "next-generation" online search and test 3G-related mobile phone services, just one month after Google launched mobile search services in China. "Baidu has to break the bottleneck of the server capacity as the demand for search surges in China," William Chang, Baidu's chief scientist, said. "Baidu has to triple its existing capacity to reach the global level of services." In the third quarter, China overtook the United States to become the world's largest search traffic, with 10 billion hits per month, Baidu said. Baidu has launched a series of new services, such as an Olympics channel, game channel, Baidu TV and online music streaming (partnered with Rock Music Group).

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The Federal Reserve on Friday released details Friday of the first auction under its newly created auction facility. The Fed will offer on Dec. 17 $20 billion in a 28-day loan. The minimum bid amount is $10 million. The minimum bid rate is 4.17%. The maximum award is $2 billion, or 10% of the offering amount. Participants must submit bids by phone to their local Reserve Bank between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. ET on Monday. The auction results will be announced on Dec. 19 at 10:00 a.m. The auction is an innovative attempt by the Fed and global central banks to inject dollar liquidity into the financial system. The auction is designed to lower inter-bank lending rates or at least put a cap on them. Inter-bank rates have been trading well above normal in recent weeks in the second bout of financial turmoil since the summer.

It seems like old times at AT&T. The nation's largest phone company announced a $15.2 billion stock buyback plan Tuesday and raised its dividend 13% to 40 cents, the biggest increase in AT&T history.

THE country's biggest listed electronics maker is to sell its loss-making computer business to an overseas investor. The Shenzhen-listed TCL Corp said yesterday it would dispose of its PC operations with the sale of an 82-percent stake in the unit. Shares of TCL stopped trading yesterday to await a further announcement. TCL's computer unit lost 67.8 million yuan (US$8.9 million) last year on sales of 2.14 billion yuan, the Huizhou-based company told the Shenzhen Stock Exchange earlier. The move follows Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC business and Acer's purchase of Gateway. TCL made a profit in the first half of the year, helped by cost cutting. Its net profit was 45.1 million yuan compared with a net loss of 746.4 million yuan a year earlier. After the sale of the PC unit, TCL will focus on the TV and telephone business. The company recently announced a deal to sell the BlackBerry phone in China next year.

BANK of China Ltd's Hong Kong unit said its purchase of a 4.9 percent stake in Bank of East Asia Ltd, the city's third-largest bank, doesn't presage a takeover. BOC Hong Kong (Holdings) Ltd, 65.8 percent owned by China's second-largest bank, yesterday announced it paid HK$3.95 billion ($507 million) for the holding, calling it a "financial investment." "At this point in time, we don't contemplate any further transaction which involves Bank of East Asia," BOC Hong Kong spokeswoman Clarina Man said in a phone interview yesterday. Yesterday's announcement surprised some analysts, who were expecting an overseas lender to target Bank of East Asia to get access to its growing branch network in China, Bloomberg News reported. La Caixa, Spain's largest savings bank, holds a 4.2 percent stake in the company. "Bank of East Asia has always been talked about as a possible target for a foreign bank to take over as a fast way to get into China and Hong Kong,"

GARMIN Ltd, the world's largest maker of personal navigation devices, unveiled an unsolicited US$3.3 billion takeover offer for Dutch digital map maker Tele Atlas NV yesterday, topping an offer by rival TomTom NV by 15 percent. Tele Atlas, which had endorsed the TomTom bid, said it was now reviewing its options. A TomTom spokesman declined to comment while the company studies the US$35.31 per share Garmin bid. TomTom shares plunged 12 percent to US$86.33, while Tele Atlas shares rose 14 percent to US$39.34, signaling that some investors are speculating the bidding will go higher. TomTom began a rush to consolidate the high-growth digital mapping industry when it said it would buy Tele Atlas for US$30.63 per share in July. On October 1, mobile phone maker Nokia Corp announced an US$8.1 billion bid for the only other global digital map maker, Navteq Corp. Both TomTom and Nokia plan to tightly integrate the maps into the design of their navigation devices and phones, and

SHARES in ZTE Corp surged by the 10 percent daily cap yesterday after it announced shareholders' approval to sell four billion yuan (US$526.3 million) in bonds to finance third-generation telephony development. Shenzhen-listed ZTE jumped 10 percent to 58.19 yuan, although the Shenzhen Composite Index dropped by 0.45 percent yesterday. "The big-cap 3G-related shares, such as China Unicom and ZTE, are expected to benefit from the coming 3G, and they are favored by investors," Yue Congzhong, an analyst at Zhongshan Securities, said in a recent note, who set ZTE's price target above 60 yuan. ZTE will raise four billion yuan through the sale of five-year convertible bonds to finance research, manufacture and construction of 11 projects, including a home-grown TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) phone and a new handset platform. ZTE, the biggest public telecommunications equipment vendor in China, got the lion's share of China Mobile's

Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker, announced Monday that it would buy U.S. navigation-software maker Navteq Corp. for around US$8.1 billion (euro5.68 billion).

EBay Inc. announced Monday that the co-founder and chief executive of its Skype division was stepping down, and that the parent company would take $1.43 billion in charges for the Internet phone service division.

EBay Inc. announced Monday that the co-founder and chief executive of its Skype division was stepping down, and that the parent company would take $1.43 billion in charges for the Internet phone service division.