BEIJING: Google CEO Eric Schmidt is confident that the firm's licence to operate in China, the world's largest Internet market, will be renewed, a report said Friday.
His comments came as the US web giant, which for months has been locked in a standoff with Beijing over state censorship, awaited word on the status of its Internet Content Provider licence, which is under annual review in China.
"We would expect we would get the necessary operating licence," Schmidt told reporters at an annual conference of media and technology moguls in the US state of Idaho, the Financial Times reported.
Google said last week that it would stop automatically redirecting Chinese users to an unfiltered site in Hong Kong, a process it began in March in response to state censorship and cyberattacks it claims came from China.
All mainland users are now directed to a new landing page on google.cn, which links to the Hong Kong site. Google has said it believes this approach complies with Chinese law.
"It was clear we had to end the redirect," Schmidt said.
He told the newspaper that the company had not had new discussions with Chinese authorities since last week and did not know when Google would receive a response to its licence application.
An official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the main regulator of China's Internet industry, told AFP earlier this week that Google's application was still under consideration.
Last month, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said in a post on the company's blog, "Without an ICP licence, we can't operate a commercial website like google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China."
China has more than 400 million web users, according to official data.