Shenzhen Easou Technology Co Ltd, which has run China's first mobile search engine Easou.com since 2005, said it received $50 million in a new round of funding and may go public on the Nasdaq in New York as early as 2013.

SB China Venture Capital, the Hsinchu, Taiwan-based company United Microelectronics Corporation and French venture capital company Ventech joined the latest round of funding, according to Frank Wang, founder and chief executive officer of Easou.

The funds will be used for recruiting new employees, investing in research and development and building up the company brand, Wang said.

"When the development of China's mobile Internet enters a more mature stage, and the annual revenue of Easou reaches 1 billion yuan ($153 million), maybe that's the time for Easou to go for a listing," Wang told China Daily on Thursday.

He said that the perfect time may fall in 2013 or 2014, but he added that Easou allows things to happen in due course.

The negotiations have already started with several investment banks for Easou's planned IPO, said people familiar with Easou who declined to reveal their names.

After six years of development, the active user number of Easou.com has climbed to 100 million in China, with the daily search hitting more than 130 million.

The company realized revenue of 100 million yuan in 2009, 160 million yuan in 2010, and expects to achieve 240 million yuan in sales this year.

According to Beijing-based research company Analysys International, in the fourth quarter of 2010, Easou was ranked as No 2 in China's mobile search market, with a market share of 18.2 percent.

Baidu Inc, topped the list by grabbing 36.1 percent of the market share. Tencent's SOSO and Google Inc followed as the third and fourth most popular mobile search engines in China.

More than 70 percent of revenue of Easou comes from advertisements. The company served about 30,000 Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises, helping them to promote their businesses on its mobile platform. The rest was contributed by music, games and software downloads, according to Wang.

Easou completed two rounds of funding in 2006 and in 2008.

Wang said venture capital investors have taken more than a 40 percent stake in the company and he remained the biggest individual shareholder of Easou.

The 35-year-old Wang did not follow his parents' advice to buy an apartment in Shenzhen in 2001. Instead, he used 100,000 yuan - the money his parents lent him to buy an apartment - to establish a company making ring tones for mobile phones.

Three years later, he sold the Shenzhen enterprise to a Japanese company for $80 million. In 2005, he set up Easou and dedicated himself to the mobile Internet business.

According to a report by research company iResearch, the user number of Chinese mobile search market is expected to surpass 320 million and may bring in revenue of 1.86 billion yuan by 2012.

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