Malaysia and Australia Thursday agreed to share the cost of the next phase of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 off Australia's west coast in September."Malaysia will provide the necessary financial contribution towards the search effort and match Australia's commitment," Malaysia's Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said.Lai met with Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss and China's Deputy Transport Minister He Jianzhong in Canberra to discuss the progress in the search for the plane.Flight MH370 with 239 people onboard disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. The plane is believed to have plunged in the southern Indian Ocean.Truss told reporters new information from satellite data suggests the plane may have turned south earlier than thought and that one particular area would become the focus of the search."The search area remains the same, but some of the information that we now have suggests to us that areas a little further to the south - within the search area, but a little further to the south - are of particular interest and priority in the search area," Truss said.The deep-sea search of an ocean area of around 60,000 square kilometres some 1,800 kilometres off the Australian coast is expected to get under way next month.Lai, Truss and Ho said in a joint statement that to date over 87,000 square kilometres of the sea floor in the search area of 1.1 million square kilometres have been surveyed."We need to find the plane. We need to find the black box to come to a conclusion," Lai said."The combination of undersea search equipment, world-class experts and cutting-edge technology that is being used will be our best chance of finding MH370 and we are hopeful in our prospects of doing so," he said.Australia has contracted Dutch survey company Fugro Survey Pty Ltd to conduct a search of the sea floor. The search is expected to last up to 12 months at an estimated cost of 60 million dollars.