Google China's president to depart this month

According to the company, Lee’s responsibilities will be shared between Boon-Lock Yeo, who is the director of Google's Shanghai’s
engineering office, and John Liu, who oversees Google's sales team in Greater China.

Yeo will be charged with managing Google China’s engineering development while Liu will become vice-president of sales and operations and manage Google’s business responsibilities.

According to reports, Lee has been with the company since 2005, when he departed Microsoft to help make a name for the search engine in the burgeoning market.

At the time, Microsoft accused Lee of violating his employment contract and sued Google for its underhanded hire. The suit was settled privately that same year.

"With a very strong leadership team in place, it seemed a very good moment for me to move to the next chapter in my career,” Lee said in a release, asserting that his departure has come on his own accord.

A statement from Google further credits Lee with making “dramatic advancements” in Google’s search capabilities and making a name for the company in China, where Baidu has long been the dominant search engine with 61.6 per cent of China’s search revenue share.

“He was instrumental in launching Google.cn, Google's China domain, which has substantially increased its user base in the last two years,” the statement continued. “In addition, Dr. Lee helped to build a number of market leading products in China,
including Google Maps, Google Mobile Search and Google Translate. Most recently he launched China's leading ad-supported music site, Google Music Search. Many of these improvements were driven by Dr. Lee's success in establishing Google China as a world-class engineering organization working on products for users in China and globally.”

Recently, Google has stepped up its mobile efforts in the market, lending its Android sourcing to China Mobile handsets to make inroads into the smartphone industry before the launch of Apple’s iPhone.

Google further declared a focus on mobile search in China, which was countered with a similar vow from rival Baidu.