Online travel services provider Ctrip.com International Ltd. fell 8.57 percent to a 52-week low on Monday, mirroring a broader decline in China Concept stocks recently.

 The company has a market cap of $2.45 billion and a P/E ratio of 15, calculated by the closing share price of $17.06. Ctrip.com stock is down almost 40 percent since March.

 Monday’s plunge was linked to Mirae Assets’s downgrading of Ctrip.com from “buy” to “hold” and reducing its price target from $28 to $21.

 The analysts wrote:

 "During our recent trip to China, we found that Qunar’s decision to placewholesalers’ hotel inventory online might pose a serious threat to CTRP’s hotelcommission. Most of these wholesalers function on a merchant model, buying hotelinventories at 4-5 star hotels at lowest prices for tourist groups. Leakage of wholesalehotel inventory to retail was a thing of the past and was easy to monitor becausevolume, mostly offline, was small and scattered. A weak economy, however, hasprompted travel wholesalers to place a larger inventory online through Qunar andTaobao Travel. The volume is too big for CTRP to monitor, in our view.”

 Qunar.com is the online travel services arm of Chinese internet goliath Baidu.com Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU). It has in recent years deployed a low-price strategy to compete with Ctrip.com and is moving towards a U.S. IPO.

 According to statistics from ctcnn.com, a domestic tourism media site, Qunar.com continuously ranked first in a list of the top 10 Chinese online travel services websites in May.

 As household incomes grow Chinese are spending more on travel -- the travel market is expected to grow from 1.5 trillion yuan in 2010 to 5.5 trillion yuan by 2020, or over $870 billion .That translates into a 14 percent annual growth rate for the Chinese travel industry.