Business news for Mon, 17 Dec 2007 & with word joint. 8 news.

HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe's biggest bank by value, aims to start three new funds on the Chinese mainland next year as it taps into the country's rising demand for investment products. "We will see a strong growth and I would be surprised if we didn't see at least US$2 billion of new funds flowing in," Rudolf Apenbrink, chief executive officer of HSBC Investments Hong Kong Ltd, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. HSBC already manages three funds worth US$1.5 billion on the mainland under the joint venture HSBC Jintrust Fund Management Co. It expects to receive regulatory approval for its fourth fund soon and will apply for the qualified domestic institutional investment, or QDII, quota in May, Apenbrink said. Financial companies, including banks, fund managers and insurers, invest abroad using QDII quotas. To cope with managing more funds, HSBC Jintrust plans to recruit as many as 20 new employees next year, Apenbrink said. The company has about 100 employees.

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).

The bitter dispute between French food and beverage maker Groupe Danone SA and its Chinese joint venture partner Wahaha has deepened, with Wahaha's labor union saying it is suing Danone.

Shareholders in two joint ventures between China's Wahaha and Danone are suing the French food company for 10 million yuan (US$1.3 million) for violating their rights, a lawyer said Sunday.

Daimler will form a truck-making joint venture in India with Hero, and has sold property in Berlin to SEB.

The IMAX big screen holds the promise of star status -- at least temporarily -- for AMC Entertainment Inc.

RIO TINTO and its joint venture partner will spend over $1 billion to expand the Kestrel coal mine in Queensland in a bid to satisfy growing demand from China.

Successful launch the first joint space mission by the two South American nations.