WALL STREET

BAIDU.COM SEEKS $101M IN IPO

China’s Baidu.com Incorporated, a search engine that models itself on Google, sought to raise as much as $101 million in an American initial public offering yesterday after raising the offer by 30% to meet investor demand.

Beijing-based Baidu.com and its stockholders boosted the number of shares they plan to sell to 4.04 million from 3.7 million. They are now asking as much as $25 a share, up from $21, according to regulatory filings. The money raised will fund new features and help Baidu.com gain a bigger slice of China’s online advertising market.

Baidu.com, founded in 2000 and now China’s most-used search engine, is tapping growing investor demand for Chinese companies and is taking advantage of surging search-engine stocks. Search advertising in China is expected to quadruple to $690 million by 2007, according to researcher iResearch Incorporated.

Shares of Google, which owns about 2.6% of Baidu.com, sold in an August 2004 IPO for $85 and are now near $300.

“Look at the chart of Google and you can see why there’s so much interest in this deal,” a sales trader at Cantor Fitzgerald & Company who follows new issues and isn’t involved in Baidu.com’s offering, Sal Morreale, said. “This deal was on the radar screens very, very early.”

Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated and Credit Suisse First Boston are managing Baidu.com’s share sale, which will represent about 13% of the company. Baidu.com’s American depositary shares will start trading today on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol BIDU.

— Bloomberg News

TWO NYSE DIRECTORS STEP DOWN

Herbert Allison and Dennis Weatherstone stepped down yesterday from the board of directors at the New York Stock Exchange, leaving two vacancies as the Big Board plans to turn into a for-profit public company.

Mr. Weatherstone and Mr. Allison did not want to be re-elected in April and agreed to remain to decide on NYSE’s purchase of Archipelago Holdings Incorporated, the NYSE said in a statement. The transaction, announced April 20, will turn the world’s largest stock market into a public company.

Mr. Allison, 62, is chairman and chief executive officer of the New York-based pension fund TIAA-CREF. He joined the board in June 2003, three months before the ouster of the former chairman Richard Grasso. Mr. Weatherstone, who is 74 years old and a former chief executive of J.P. Morgan, was elected to the board in November 2003.

— Bloomberg News

TECHNOLOGY

MICROSOFT HIRES COO FROM WAL-MART

Microsoft Corporation, the world’s biggest software maker, named Wal-Mart Stores Incorporated’s Kevin Turner as chief operating officer to shift some responsibilities from its chief executive, Steve Ballmer.

Mr. Turner, 40, will run sales, marketing, and service as well as the company’s fulfillment and technology operations, Microsoft said yesterday in a statement. He starts September 8.

Microsoft hasn’t had an operating chief since Rick Belluzzo left in 2002, leaving Mr. Ballmer to oversee seven business units and all operational divisions. As an outsider, Mr.Turner also has to learn to work with Mr. Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates, a task others found to be a challenge. Senior executives Mr. Belluzzo, Maggie Wilderotter, and Richard Emerson each left in three years or less.

— Bloomberg News