A long-term strategic partnership has been established between China’s B2B e-commerce portal alibaba.com and Infomedia, India’s largest yellow pages and special interest publishing company.

Alibaba’s net profit rose to 967.8 million yuan, more than quadrupling that of last year. Currently, the Hang-zhou based company has nearly 300,000 paid members, possessing about a 70% market share of the online B2B trade in China.

And in India, since the launching of its Indian channel last December, around 20,000 Indian companies have signed up each month for it. The number of Alibaba’s members has already exceeded 400,000.

The partnership of the two sides will see the integration of the power of traditional print publishing with online media and e-commerce to provide India’s small and medium-sized companies with a one-stop solution for global and domestic trade.

“India is a priority market for Alibaba’s global plans and Infomedia will help provide on-ground support including sales, marketing and customer service,” said the Alibaba CEO Wei Zhe.

“We believe the alliance will help Alibaba become a major online trade platform in India by the end of 2008,” Wei said.

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Alibaba.com is the largest business-to-business website, which started out helping millions of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises sell their goods on the internet.

Last year, the company’s revenue grew 58.6% to 2.16 billion yuan and its net profit surged 340% to 968 million yuan, which was attributed to the rise in the number of the company’s paying members and their increased averaged online consumption.

Despite the current economic slowdown at the global scale, Alibaba.com expected to see dynamic growth this year. “I think we will maintain fast growth this year because people in difficulties tend to diversify their product sourcing and supply in order to reduce risks,” said Wei Zhe, CEO of Alibaba.com.

According to Alibaba.com, 72% of the company’s revenue came from online trade between China and foreign countries and only 28% from trade within China. Revenue from domestic trade is expected to rise as China’s internal demands grow. Meanwhile, the company also has plans to open a joint venture with Softbank in Japan this year and increase its business presence in Europe and India to seek greater international opportunities.

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