Baidu Inc, which operates China's most popular Internet search engine, said Thursday its first-quarter profit jumped 165 percent on a rise in revenue and numbers of advertising customers.

Net income in the three months to March 31 rose to US$70.4 million, or US$2.02 a share, the Beijing-based company said. Revenue grew 60 percent to US$189.6 million.

Both exceeded the expectation in a Thomson Reuters poll of analysts, which forecast earnings of US$1.50 per share on revenue of US$180 million.

Baidu got a big boost in China last month after Google Inc shut its mainland-based search engine to move to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

Baidu said it had about 221,000 active online marketing customers, up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier but down 1 percent from the previous quarter.

Revenue per online marketing customer rose 34 percent from a year earlier to $864. That figure was up 3.5 percent from the previous quarter.

For the second quarter, Baidu said it expects revenue to rise 67 percent to 70 percent to between US$268 million and US$274 million.

Baidu's American depositary shares rose US$88.61, or 14.3 percent, to US$709.99 in after-hours trading on Wednesday, after climbing US$1.27 to close at US$621.38 in the regular session.

The company also announced a 10-for-1 split for its American depositary shares that will be reflected in share prices as of May 12. The ordinary shares are not changing.

(Xinhua News Agency April 29, 2010)