Alibaba Becomes ICANN-Accredited Registrar

March 17, 2008; 10:30 AM

HANGZHOU, Mar 17, 2008 (SinoCast via COMTEX)- Alibaba.com Ltd. (SEHK: 1688) has become the an accredited registrar of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said market sources on March 13, 2008.

With the license, Alibaba can provide top-level domain names for companies and individuals. And it plans to launch a new project to add a new source of charges. The company might buy the nation's major domain name service providers to provide better and more diversified services for small and medium companies, said people closed to the company.

As the B2B arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, Alibaba.com now has two paid products - China Supplier and TrustPass. It went public on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong on November 6, 2007. To improve its performance, it has been finding ways to turn its registered users into paid members after that. For instance, it launched plans of hiring 2,000 sales staff around the nation and cooperating with banks to provide lending services for its clients.

Alibaba previously said that it had 24.6 million registered users, among which around 250,000 are paid members by the end of June 2007. </P>

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