For Google, a Threat to China With Little Revenue at Stake

By MIGUEL HELFT
NYT

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has said principle drove its threat to back out of China unless the government there allowed it to run its search engine without censorship.

Analysts say that inevitably, the decision was a business calculation, too.

Google’s business in China, for now, remains small. Estimates put Google’s China revenue last year at about $300 million, a tiny fraction of its more than $22 billion in global sales.

Still, Google’s investment in China includes building a staff of more than 600 people there, many of them highly paid engineers. And in October, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, predicted that China would become a dominant market for online businesses, saying that in five years, the Internet “will be more non-English, it will be Chinese.” Clearly, Google has high hopes for its business there.

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