Yahoo's China portal plans to fend off its rivals by providing superior search services for business-minded customers, said Ma Yun, an e-commerce magnate in charge of Yahoo's China operations.

Ma is CEO of the Alibaba Group, which dominates China's market for online commerce sites that link foreign buyers with Chinese wholesalers.

In 2005, Yahoo transferred its China operations to Alibaba.

As part of that deal, Mountain View, California-based Yahoo Inc. took a 40-percent stake in privately-held Alibaba, which also owns popular consumer auction site Taobao.com, and China's leading online payment service, Alipay.

Alibaba will continue to restructure Yahoo China, Ma said in an interview, admitting that Yahoo China continued to lose money in 2006. Since taking the helm at Yahoo China, Ma has tried to change it from an all-round, generalist website into a specialist search engine.

Facing fierce competition from domestic search giant Baidu and popular web portals such as Sina.com, Yahoo China has to provide specialized commerce search services, Ma said.

Baidu's users are mostly students, Ma said, but Yahoo China will focus on business people, targeting high-end clients including rich entrepreneurs that use Alibaba's e-commerce platform for online transactions.

Yahoo will provide clients with a better search engine that provides superior business information during online transactions, according to Ma's plan.

Links to Yahoo's search engine will be embedded into Alisoft, a new web-based business software program launched by Alibaba to facilitate online trade, according to the company source.

High-end customers are the focus, Ma said, and the company will not bother non-business clients.

It is estimated that China had 97.06 million search engine users in 2005, representing 87.4 percent of all Internet users in the country. The number of search engine users no doubt exceeded 100 million in 2006.

(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)