PPC is going to be factored into the overall online advertising stats, so there is a great deal of relevance if you're planning to monetize the domains by parking them with LOCAL ads i.e. ads in that language. Clearly the bids aren't going to be there to any significant degree in some languages for quite a long time...
Frankly, it doesn't make any real difference to any of us what's happening off-line. For example, there's massive growth in radio advertising in China right now, but that doesn't change the online math. It's only money being spent on getting customers via the web that will float our boats...
Another key metric is credit card use. Stats from late 2004 suggest only 2 million consumers in China have credit cards (though some may have several cards) so that's basically the sum total of people who can BUY something online.
Again, let's not mix apples and oranges - an exploding local economy doesn't necessarily have to be fueled by the Web, and in this case it seems to be mainly cash-based transactions pulling in the numbers...
In fact, in China in particular there is likely to be far too much traffic chasing far, far too few advertisers. Baidu is one of the busiest sites on the Web - Alexa has it pegged just behind Google - yet they brought in just US$39.6 million in revenues for the whole of 2005 (see their Q4 income statement, below) vs US$6.139 billion for Google. In other words, Google brought in approx. 155x as much revenue as Baidu from a relatively small amount more traffic (compared to the revenue disparity, anyway). This almost perfectly mirrors the difference in the two advertising markets. China, as we've seen, has about $250 million in online advertising, vs $11.3 billion in the US - that's a 45x differential.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_...iduQ4_2005.pdf
http://investor.google.com/releases/2005Q4.html
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=77429
Factor in all the other Chinese mega-portals (and those seem to be growing all the time) and it's obvious there is a staggering glut of almost totally unmonetized traffic.