Alibaba Group's consumer online-auction site Taobao, a competitor to eBay in China, announced key metrics for the first quarter of 2007. Taobao said it had created more than 100,000 "jobs" at the end of the quarter, defining jobs as users who earn a profit of more than RMB2,000 per month by selling through the Taobao.com Web site.

Regarding recent reports that Taobao's B2C business might start charging fees, company spokesperson Porter Erisman said, "We are offering some optional value added services for large retailers using Taobao for the B2C section of our site. These new optional services apply only to larger retailers and not small individual retailers."

Taobao released additional metrics on Wednesday:

• Transaction volume, or gross merchandise volume (GMV), for the quarter surpassed US$900 million (RMB7 billion), a 100 per cent increase from the first quarter of 2006 and almost equivalent to the total GMV for the full year 2005 (RMB8 billion).
• Average daily transaction volume approached US$13 million (RMB100 million).
• The number of registered users exceeded 35 million, a 95 per cent increase from the 18 million users in the first quarter of 2006, and accounting for nearly all Internet users in China who say they shop online.
• More than 60 million products were listed on the Web site, an increase of 10 million products, compared with the fourth quarter of 2007 and a 100 per cent increase from the first quarter of 2006.

Toto Sun, President of Taobao, said, "The dynamic growth in Taobao's GMV reflects the overall maturity of China's online shopping market. The Internet is not only making people's lives more convenient, but it is also providing employment opportunities for China's broader economy. We believe that Taobao can create one million jobs by 2009."