Yesky and Chinabyte, two of the biggest information technology portals in China, were merged on Wednesday and the new company should begin to make profits in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a senior executive of Yesky.

The spokespersons of the two companies declined to reveal the details of the merger, such as the division of shares in the new company,according to today's China Daily.

It was reported previously that the International Data Group£¨IDG £© will continue to be the biggest shareholder and Li Zhigao, CEO of Yesky, will hold the same post in the new company, which will be called Yesky Information Development Co Ltd.

According to Li, the company has received an unspecified amount of capital from some of its shareholders, which include IDG, News Corporation Ltd, People's Daily and China PC Weekly £¨CPCW£©, the third-best-selling weekly in China.

The new company will not cut jobs after the merger.

"Both Yesky and Chinabyte are not over-staffed and some new areas of our business may need more staff,'' Li said.

Li expected the company would break even in the third quarter and begin to make profits in the fourth.

Their strong media background is believed to be crucial to the development of the company.

"Many information technology£¨IT£© portals have found it necessary to integrate with other offline media, but our core competitiveness is in online operations,'' said Li.

The new company will act as an advertising agent for two publications of CPCW to tap the potentials of the resources of China's best-selling IT weekly and Yesky's reputation among Internet users.

Production of TV and broadband programmes will also be two major areas of development.

"News Corp has a very good marketing channel and rich advertising resources.'' said Li. "It will be of great help to our expansion to other media.''

Recently, it has become a usual practice that IT portals acquire offline businesses to diversify their revenue sources. CCIDNET.com, a Chinese IT web company, began to produce IT TV programmes and they have been received positively. China Internet Weekly also became very active in the organization of IT seminars and conferences.