Lenovo had a very successful branding campaign at the Beijing Olympics, where 30,000 pieces of its IT equipment were used to support the event. The world’s 4th-largest PC-maker has now launched its direct sales arm on Taobao via http://lenovo2008.mall.taobao.com/ and its S9 laptop model will be offered at a record low price of 2,999 yuan (US$438).

In early July at the company’s 5th anniversary celebrations,  Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma had shared his vision for Taobao to outstrip the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart in 10 year and the short-term target is to surpass eBay and Amazon.

Taobao.com is the C2C subsidiary of the largest ecommerce company in China – Alibaba Group.

The leading Chinese B2B portal, Alibaba, had announced that its interim first half revenues climbed 47.8% year-on-year to reach 1.415 billion yuan (US$204.7 million). Net profit for the period surged 136.2% YoY to 697.2 million yuan (US$102 mil).

At end-June, Alibaba’s total storefronts rose 54.1% y-o-y to 3.8 million and combined marketplaces increased 44% from a year earlier to 368,006 paying members.

Alibaba, the world’s largest online B2B operator, posted 32.53 million registered users, up 32.5% y-o-y, of which 26.91 million were in China and the rest from other parts of the world. Revenue from the Chinese market jumped 84.6% YoY to reach 481.6 million yuan ($70.4 mil)

Revenue from the international market during the period amounted to 933.4 mln yuan ($136.5 mil), up 34% YoY.

Alibaba entered into a strategic partnership with Infomedia India in April 2008 and the India operations has since been Alibaba’s fastest growing business, tapping on a potential reach of 8 million Indian SMEs.