HONG KONG: Year of the Horse, move over. For China’s class of 2014, it’s looking like Dawn of the Geek.
Alibaba Group plans a five-fold recruitment boost to snare top graduates, with 1,000 new hires being offered as much as triple last year’s average pay. There’s also the added lure of stock in what may be the biggest initial public offering since Facebook’s $16bn sale in 2012.
The Chinese e-commerce giant founded 14 years ago by Jack Ma and 17 friends in an apartment is taking to campuses nationwide as talent becomes the latest battleground with Tencent Holdings and Baidu. China’s three biggest Internet companies have announced $3.5bn of deals this year to win more of the country’s 590m Web users and the $230bn spent annually on e-commerce and online advertising.
Alibaba, valued by investment banks at as much as $190bn, is adding graduates to its 24,000 work force to develop products that will win mobile users ahead of an IPO. Recruiters for the Hangzhou, China-based company are visiting universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong among 20 cities targeted, according to Alibaba’s website.
The average annual salary for last year’s 170 college recruits was 200,000 yuan ($32,850), about seven times the average annual wage for urban workers, according to Wen De, who supervises the campus hiring efforts in China.
New recruits that join the company’s “A-Star” programme may be paid as much as 600,000 yuan as it targets engineers, product managers, and user-interface designers, Wen told prospective hires on a webcast last month.
“Once you get into the A-Star programme, you won’t need to worry about buying an apartment and a car; you don’t need to worry about your annual salary,” Wen said. “The key is that you have real talent and capability. Alibaba’s salary offer is very competitive.”
The closely held company, which grants a type of share to employees, could raise about HK$100bn ($12.9bn) in an initial public offering, Ernst & Young LLP said in June.
The e-commerce company more than doubled second-quarter net income to $707m from $273m a year earlier. By comparison, the California-based Facebook earned $425m in the three months ended September 30.
Alibaba doesn’t sell merchandise itself. Instead, it runs platforms including Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com that connect retail brands with consumers — a cross between Amazon.com and eBay. The company accounted for 70 percent of package deliveries in China last year, according to Ma.
With competition for mobile users intensifying as more consumer go wireless, candidates can afford to be more choosy.
The most sought-after people are those with skills in mobile, Internet finance and location-based services.
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