Google: Still In China, In One Form Or Another

As rumors swirl that Google will pull up its Google.cn stakes in China by the end of March, it’s far from the end of the line for the company here. Google is still confident about the expansion of many of its other products, with Google CFO Patrick Pichette commenting that he expected sales of Android, the company’s handset platform, to “flourish.”

China Unicom, one of the country’s largest telecom service providers, has already agreed to sell Android handsets, according to Mike Harvey in The Times Online.

In addition to Android, Google is banking on the success of its Chrome browser, its China music portal, and web applications such as Gmail and Google Documents – though how it will expand Google Documents when the application is blocked most of the time remains to be seen. Essentially, Google pulling out of China is just Google closing down just one of its business ventures there, and a less-profitable one at that.

Though Google is predicting a rosy future for some of its products in China, a recent open letter to the company from a group of its Chinese investors that calls for the Internet giant to be held financially responsible for any upset, financial or otherwise, indicates that all might not go as smoothly as Google hopes.