China News - eLong down, Ctrip up and Qunar in the money

Round of news coming out of the online travel scene in China tells and interesting story:

1. Number 2 player eLong posted its Q3 results. Good news started and ended with an reported increase in revenue. Bad news was that revenue was only up 12% and losses have widened from RMB2.7mm (USD365k) in Q3 06 to RMB 7.4mm (USD1mm) in Q3 07. Stock is almost half it was a year ago. New CEO Cui Guangfu has a big job ahead of them to catch up with...
2. Ctrip posted a great result this quarter - beating expectations - announcing an almost doubling of profits to USD15mm for the quarter on revenues of $46mm. In a clear dig at eLong, Ctrip attributed a lot of the credit for the results to rising travel demand. Shares are similarly moving the opposite direction to eLong. But any possible conflict in signals about the market from the different results between number one and number two in China did not dissuade...
3. Lehman Brothers Private Equity Partners dropped $10mm into local meta search player Qunar.com. It was Qunar's second round of funding. First round was in the $2-3mm range with Mayfield leading that round. UPDATE - here is the alarm:clock story including information that Qunar founders Douglas Khoo, CC Zhuang, and Fritz Demopoulos had previously founded and sold the CSEEK search engine to News Corporation and founded and sold the Shawei.com portal to The Tom Group.

Busy days in China.