Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) chief executive officer Jack Ma (馬雲) said he was on a recruiting drive to lure Silicon Valley engineers to China and that the company needed 5,000 more employees this year to keep up with demand.
The economic slowdown is a “treasure,” letting the company recruit employees from Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, Ma said on Friday in an interview in San Francisco.
The company plans to double its US staff to about 50, he said.
Ma’s plans are part of a bid to expand Alibaba’s reach and attract more users outside China. The company, which owns the Alibaba.com and Taobao.com e-commerce sites, aims to boost the company’s workforce to 17,000 this year.
The economic slump won’t dent Alibaba’s growth, Ma said.
“We’ve been preparing for globalization and to have more users outside China for two years,” the 44-year-old Ma said. “Now it’s time to take action.”
Ma and 10 senior managers from China are in the US for the next two weeks. They’re meeting with eight companies, including eBay Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft, to try to form partnerships, Ma said.
Alibaba, based in Hangzhou, China, also runs AliPay, which enables companies to exchange funds online.
As China’s exports decline amid the global recession, Alibaba is helping small and medium-sized businesses withstand the slump, Ma said. The company has added more membership plans, giving customers cheaper options, he said. He added that Alibaba.com would spend US$30 million this year to market its Web site overseas to support demand for Chinese exporters that use its services.
Alibaba Group is partly owned by Yahoo Inc, whose cofounder and former CEO Jerry Yang (楊致遠) is a director at Alibaba Group.
After failing to reach a buyout agreement with Microsoft last year, Yang said Yahoo might be interested in selling its Asian assets, which also include Yahoo Japan Corp and Gmarket Inc. Alibaba would be open to buying back Yahoo’s stake if offered, Ma said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day