E-commerce will become an indispensable part of people's daily life in a decade, said Alibaba Group Chairman Ma Yun yesterday.

"In ten years e-commerce will be completely integrated into people's life just like water and air, electricity and public transportation," Ma said.

"I believe that in five years, 80 per cent of the people in the world will use e-commerce in their daily life," he added.

Establishing Alibaba.com in his own apartment in Hangzhou in 1999, Ma saw his company's robust growth in the past seven years and which has now become China's largest e-commerce company and the world's largest online business-to-business (B2B) platform for global trade.

Alibaba owns Alibaba International (alibaba.com), Alibaba China (china.alibaba.com), Taobao (taobao.com) and Alipay.

The company acquired Yahoo China in October 2005, extending its business portfolio further from online marketplace and payment to Internet search.

Ma hoped to build up new online platform for service providers later.

"We will make it happen in the next few years," Ma said.

"Demand for services such as finance, consultation, insurance, delivery, shipping will remain strong in the coming years and putting them online will surely meet a lot of people's expectation and interests," he said.

Alibaba now works primarily as product, not service matchmaker for buyers and sellers in and outside China.

Ma also said Alibaba's goal to go global would remain unchanged.

"We will step up our efforts to go global," he said. "We will try our best to help more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from all around the world to develop their businesses through Alibaba."

"We would like to see more SMEs with little budget prosper through our website," he added.

Now more than 500,000 people visit Alibaba International (alibaba.com) everyday.

Alibaba aims to offer a total of 100 million jobs in China in the next few years, Ma said.

Thousands of people including university students and graduates have opened their online shops in Taobao (taobao.com), Alibaba's subsidiary and the largest consumer e-commerce website in Asia with registered users amounting to more than 27 million.

"They are all doing well and we hope to attract more people to start their careers (open their own online shops) through Alibaba later," Ma said.

(HK Edition 11/21/2006 page3)