Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com Ltd will spend more than 100 million yuan (US$14 million) on recruitment and personnel training this year to expand its market share after raising about US$1.5 billion in a stock sale in Hong Kong late last year.

The company, which runs the largest business-to-business online market place in China, plans to add 3,000 people to its payroll, it said yesterday. Of the new people, 2,000 will join its sales force, and Alibaba will spend an average 20,000 yuan training each sales person.

"We will greatly expand our sales network across the country to be close to where our customers might be," said the Hangzhou, eastern Zhejiang Province-based company in a statement.

Alibaba had 4,400 people as of June last year, of whom 1,900 were working in 29 sales offices on the Chinese mainland. Few of the staff that joined the company last year had left, it said.

Alibaba has about 30 million members, mostly small and medium Chinese companies that use its platform to seek buyers or suppliers in and out of China.

It dominated 67 percent of online business-to-business trading in the third quarter last year, according to Analysys International.

(Shanghai Daily February 21, 2008)