China's leading e-commerce platform Alibaba Group has recently announced a global recruitment plan to hire 3,000 technology talents across the world.

Of these 3,000 posts, about 2,000 are offered by its Hong Kong-listed Alibaba company and other subsidiaries of the group, including Taobao, Alipay and Alisoft, will also hire 300, 100 and 20 new employees, respectively, as noted on Chinabyte.com.

According to Peng Lei, chief human resources officer of Alibaba Group, the company started to seek top industry talents at the beginning of 2008. At present, it has attracted a batch of technical experts from Silicon Valley in the United States.

Alibaba recently launched its newest expansion as it opened its South China headquarters in Guangzhou Development District, making it the group's second regional headquarters since the opening of its Hangzhou headquarters. According to the reports in local media, Wei Zhe, president of Alibaba, says that the economic environment for small and medium enterprises in the Pearl River Delta has been changing, so the establishment of Alibaba's Guangzhou headquarters aims to help these enterprises find new business channels.

The company's Alipay online payment service also announced that by the end of August 2008, the number of its users has reached over 100 million, making it the second largest payment platform after American-based Paypal, which has over 180 million users in the world.