China's e-commerce giant, the Alibaba Group, held an annual staff conference just several days after Chinese Lunar New Year. It has been proposed at the conference that Alibaba will strive to become one of the world's top 500 companies and will also try to rank among the top three Internet companies worldwide by 2009. 2009 will be the tenth year of the establishment of Alibaba. The occasion marks the first time a domestic Internet company has publicly announced its ambition to enter world's top 500 companies.

In just a few short years, Alibaba has established an e-commerce empire. Wei Zhe, commented on the current situation of Alibaba: "Alibaba has begun to establish a new procedure for further development. Metaphorically speaking, Alibaba is still wearing the same shoes it wore when it was first established. Now, the company has grown and these shoes no longer fit --- we need a new operating procedure."

The B2B division of Alibaba announced in January of 2007 that it will set up offices in China's ten major regions: Chengdu, Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Dalian, Wuhan, Chongqing, Hefei and Nanjing. This initiative is indicative of Alibaba's expansionary strategy that sees the company coming from the coastal region of China to the mainland.

In order to meet such expansion, Wei Zhe is currently carrying out new procedures. Specifically, this year 2001 new employees will join Wei's team increasing the number of staff in the B2B subsidiary of Alibaba over 5000. Alibaba as a whole will be expanded to over 7000 members. As for customers, Alibaba will adopt different modes of services directed at enterprise customers with different operating hours and operating conditions. In addition, Alibaba will carry out different career planning for its staff, using a different incentive mechanism and management model.

As Alibaba is the Chinese Internet company with the largest number of customers overseas, it will dedicate itself more to overseas markets in 2007.
 
The United States and Japan are China's top two trading partners, and therefore, Alibaba will step up its cooperation with Yahoo America and Yahoo Japan by means of developing the business of overseas buyers. In addition, Alibaba will also establish a strategic partnership with well-known domestic and foreign exhibition organizations to create new opportunities for development.

"Our plan to expand to markets overseas has been adopted because we need a larger platform to compete with international powers while opening up new trade channels for import and export," said Wei.

Although China has lagged behind countries such as the United States regarding e-commerce, Chinese local corporations are expected to win positions in the global e-commerce market in the next few years due to the staggering domestic market, localized operating costs and the increasing overseas demand. 

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