Shawn Wang, chief financial officer of Baidu.com Inc, the leading Chinese search engine that can search websites, audio files, and images, has reportedly died in an accident that occurred on Dec. 27, the company said in a statement.

The deadly incident took place in China. According to the company’s statement Wang was on his Christmas holiday. The statement didn’t give details about the accident and its spokesmen and officials weren’t immediately available for comments on the matter.

"We are all completely shocked and deeply saddened by this tragic news," Baidu Chairman and Chief Executive Robin Li said in the above mentioned statement.

Wang joined the Beijing-based company three years ago and helped it list on the Nasdaq stock exchange the following year. In August 2005, Baidu went public on Nasdaq at $27 a share; less than 21/2 years later, it's trading at nearly 15 times its IPO price.

"Shawn's leadership and vision helped transform Baidu into a leading US public company, and his presence will be greatly missed," added Li in the company statement.

The Company said that Wang’s as duties chief financial officer would be assumed by the company's senior managers for now.

Shawn Wang was also an independent director and chairman of the board's audit committee at WuXi PharmaTech, the Shanghai provider of outsourced drug-development services.

Baidu is often regarded as China's version of Google because of the Chinese-language search engine's popularity and profits and thanks to its interface which is very similar with that of Google. Baidu’s recorded a net profit of $24.2 millions in the third quarter of 2007.

It also has an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia (Baidu Baike), and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files.