Alibaba's chief executive Jack Ma wants to be Number One in China. E-Bay has already bitten the dust as the dominant e-commerce site in China, now his horizons are Asia and Europe.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Chinese internet company Alibaba.com vowed to beat US-based Google at its own game and become the dominant search engine for the potentially lucrative Chinese market.

Alibaba.com chief executive Jack Ma made the claim whilst attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Pusan (South Korea).

His company is the already the undisputed king of the Web in China after seeing off e-commerce rival e-Bay with 11 million product listings on its website.

With 100 million users, the Chinese market is the second in the world and growing. It has vetted the appetites of world giants like Google Inc. and MSN, and local brand names like Baidu.com Inc. and Sohu.com Inc.

Last august Yahoo! bought 40 per cent of Alibaba for US billion and turned over its Chinese operations to help it grow faster in the Chinese market, creating a joint venture worth US$ 4 billion.

But Alibaba wants to increased the number of search engines, from Yahoo!'s current 100 to 4oo or 500 as well as move Yahoo!'s 2,000 servers from the US to China and increase them to 3,000 by 2006.

In the next two to three years, Alibaba plans to expand in South Korea, and later move into the Japanese market. Whilst it also plans to boost its presence in Europe, its focus will remain China and Asia.

Mr Ma expects China to become the "No1 Internet country" in the world in five years.

He founded Alibaba.com in 1999 with US$ 2,000 of capital borrowed from relatives.

• china
• united
• states
• jack
• ma
• alibaba.com
• internet
• company
• expansion