Sao Paulo, Brazil, 22 March – Website alibaba.com, China’s biggest business to business website, started operating in Brazil last week, a country that has significant growth potential, according to the website’s sales director Timothy Leung.

The Hong Kong based company established a partnership with another Hong Kong company,, Ludatrade Technologies, for this business deal in Brazil, whose economy and Internet access levels make the country “ripe” for the alibaba.com formula of promoting the products of small and medium-sized companies.

“We plan to have a growth rate in Brazil of 30 to 50 percent,” the chief executive of Ludatrade, Kenneth Ma said in Sao Paulo Thursday.

The alibaba.com website is well-known in Asia for bringing together sellers and buyers and is available in three languages – English, Chinese and Japanese.

Each company pays a one-off fee to promote its products and to obtain information about potential customers in 240 countries and territories. The fee is currently 3000 Hong Kong dollars (US$386), according to Leung.

However, Ma said that in Brazil that fee would be US$580 dollars, in order to cover the cost of translating the product descriptions and catalogues into English and to carry out buyer checks.

Leung said that 156,000 users in Brazil had already contracted the services of alibaba.com and thus the company’s workers in the country would be increased from 20 to around 1,000.

Alibaba.com, whose parent company Alibaba Group is 40 percent owned by US group Yahoo, saw net income of US$162 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. (macauhub)