Baidu forecasts $626.6 million revenue in Q3

Baidu Inc made a forecast for its revenues for the third quarter, outpacing well ahead Wall Street's expectations as large advertisers increased spending.

A Chinese top search engine has seen a significant growth of its profits as it has focused on online video and e-commerce over the past time.

Seeing large flows of money from big advertising customers in the largest Internet market in the world Baidu posted $252.6 million net profit in the second quarter of 2011.

"The company is pretty confident on the longer term outlook since growth is coming from across the industries," said Dick Wei, an analyst at JPMorgan in Hong Kong.

"Overall we remain positive on Baidu. As the largest search engine in China, they continued to gain market share and are taking more of their advertisers from offline to online platforms."

Baidu forecast revenue of $611.1 million to $626.6 million in the third quarter, outpacing Wall Street's expected $569.6 million.

Shares in Baidu, which have risen more than 60 percent so far in 2011, were trading at $166.74 after hours after closing up 1.65 percent at $156.54 on the Nasdaq.