Alipay, the Internet payment subsidiary of the Chinese B2B e-commerce group Alibaba, has confirmed that after a one-year distribution timeline, its mobile phone payment service will enter an official promotion stage this year.

At present, Alipay has published recruitment information to hire wireless development engineers, including mobile phone product developers, wireless product managers, and wireless system engineers for the mobile phone payment service. The company is expected to set up a large wireless team before the end of 2009.

Song Manyuan, manager for Alipay's wireless business department, told local media that Alipay started tapping the mobile phone payment business at the beginning of 2008. After a one-year beta test and development period, this service will be officially launched later in 2009.

More than 100,000 accounts reportedly participated in the beta test. Users who want to use the mobile phone payment service should bind their mobile phones with their Alipay accounts first and order the mobile phone payment service. Then they can complete transfers and shopping by sending short messages to a designated short message service number. The upper limit of the amount of payment is CNY200.

Song said mobile phone payment is a strategic business of Alipay and the company hopes to add cooperative partner resources and technology resources in this sector to provide better services to its users.