Jack Ma, founder and chief executive of Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, expects Yahoo! China to be profitable within a year, although he has no expectations that the site will soon be challenging rivals Baidu or Google on the mainland market.
'Next year Yahoo will be healthy and the year after next we want to make Yahoo a top-tier company in China, " Ma said. He said the mainland version of Yahoo was currently the sixth-ranked search engine in China and that he would consider top-tier to be in the top three.
Baidu is China's top search engine, followed by Google Inc's Chinese-language version.
Ma had earlier said the company may abandon Yahoo! China if they could not make it operational, although he was now more confident in the service.
'Today I would say I am happy with the first year's result - Yahoo (China) survived, the company (has) stabilized,' Ma said.
Alibaba took over Yahoo! China's operations in 2005 in a deal in which Yahoo! took a 40 pct stake in Alibaba in exchange for 1 bln usd cash and the injection of all of Yahoo! Inc's China assets into Alibaba.
The US Yahoo! had been making little headway against domestic rival Baidu and Google, which had not at that time even started operations on the mainland.
Ma said Yahoo! China has still not made progress against its rivals but that Alibaba was currently more interested in improving the quality of the product.
'Today the market-share people have a low expectation for Yahoo, but we don't care. Even tomorrow, Yahoo could have a one-percent market share for search engines but, so what?'
He said the company has focused on improving Yahoo! China's search technology and that it was ready to start launching new services in September and October.
Alibaba's main products are its eponymous business-to-business site, Yahoo China, payment service Alipay and auction site Taobao.
The company, which also has Softbank as a major investor, is seen as one of China's top internet companies and investors have been long awaiting a public offering of shares.
Ma said there was no timeframe set up to go public and that Alibaba wants to first develop some of its businesses. He said the group itself is profitable and remains cash-flush, retaining 250 mln usd of the funds injected by Yahoo! as well as funds from its earlier capital raising exercises.
'We are profitable even if AliPay is zero revenue, Taobao is zero revenue and Yahoo is losing money. Through Alibaba alone we are profitable,' Ma said.
The auction site is currently a free service, competing against eBay Inc's mainland Eachnet service. The two have been sparring for market share and not collecting service and transaction charges that have allowed auction services to become profitable elsewhere.
"Today I want the TaoBao team to focus on getting more and more people (users) and more and more transactions," said Ma.
Ma last year said the auction site would not start charging listing fees for two to three years.
Ma was speaking on the sidelines of a gathering of Alibaba users and e-commerce entrepreneurs in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered.
Source:佚名