China's top auction site gets two bln yuan in additional investment

BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhua) -- Taobao.com, China's top consumer-to-consumer
(C2C) site, will receive a further two billion yuan (292 million U.S. dollars)
in investment from its parent Alibaba Group over the next five years.

The decision was announced at the five-year anniversary ceremony of the
group by Ma Yun, founder and CEO of the Hong Kong-listed corporation.

"The two billion yuan investment will be spent in the next five years on
technology, innovation, introduction of talent and other aspects," he said.

The huge amount is the third and largest investment from Alibaba since the
establishment of Taobao.com, far exceeding the 1.45 billion yuan it received
from its parent starting from 2003.

Ma set a long-term goal for Taobao.com to surpass U.S. giant Wal-Mart, the
world's top retailer, whose trading volume reached 3.5 trillion yuan globally
last year. The estimated trading volume for Taobao.com this year was 100 billion
yuan.

"Wal-Mart needs to buy more market sites, equipment and warehousing if they
want to win another 10,000 customers. But for Taobao.com, we only need to get
several new network servers," he said.

Taobao.com is currently the nation's dominant online retailer with 67
million registered accounts. About 10 million customers visit Taobao
daily.