Search them

"Yahoo! China's new direction can be summed up in one key word - 'search'". That's AFX News on Jack Ma's 'relaunch' of Yahoo! China as quoted in Forbes. The Alibaba.com boss is obviously setting his sights on market leader Baidu.com which, according to the article, has a 37% market share against Yahoo! China's 32%. Google lags in China with just 19%.

Ma dismisses the Google threat in China pretty much out of hand. He is quoted as saying "Today Baidu is probably the only (search) player in China...Google's servers are still in the States, Google does not have a team in China yet. I think we moved fast enough."

Without giving any numbers, he is reported to have said that Alibaba's B2B actvities were "profitable enough to cover the expenses for its customer-to-customer (C2C) website, Taobao.com, and its online payment service, AliPay".