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.
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