By Alexei Oreskovic and Paul Thomasch
SUN VALLEY, Idaho (Reuters) - GOOGLE (GOOG.NQ)Inc Chief Executive Eric Schmidt is confident the company will secure a license to operate a website in China, confounding speculation Beijing may reject them and avert a shutdown of its flagship site in China.
Schmidt, addressing executives and financiers at an annual gathering of the industry's movers and shakers in Sun Valley, said he now expected Beijing to renew its license to operate a website in the world's largest Internet market, but offered no timeframe.
"We would expect we would get the necessary license," Schmidt said. "We now expect to get renewal."
Google stunned markets and consumers in January when it warned it might quit the country, saying it will not provide the censored search results that China requires. In March, it began to redirect visitors on its local website to a site in Hong Kong that provided uncensored results.
Analysts and investors have discounted a severe curtailment of Google's business in the world's No. 3 economy. Its stock has slid more than 26 percent this year, hit partly by fears that its stance against censorship will incense a Chinese government intent of maintaining control over the flow of information within its borders.
An outright rejection -- as expected by some analysts -- could spell Beijing's dissatisfaction with Google's stance, spelling future trouble for its other non-search businesses there such as Android-based mobile phones, now carried by the nation's largest telecoms carriers.
Google now operates a landing page for its Google.cn website and clicking anywhere on the page brings the user to the Google.com.hk site. But if Beijing refuses to renew its license, the site will be effectively shut down.
Google said last week it will stop automatically rerouting users to its uncensored Hong Kong search site after Beijing indicated it will not renew Google's ICP license if it continued to do so.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which reviews Internet Content Provider licenses but has called the application "late."
Schmidt's comments come halfway through what has been a tumultuous year for the company, as the world's No. 1 search leader deepened its rivalry with iPhone-maker Apple and social network Facebook.
Google, which generated nearly $24 billion in 2009, is due to report its second-quarter financial results next week. Shares in the company ended Thursday up 1.4 percent at $456.56 and were little changed after-hours.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic and Paul Thomasch, Writing by Edwin Chan; Editing by Gary Hill, Bernard Orr)
