Oracle adopts aggressive mainland expansion strategy

Oracle Corp, the world's largest enterprise software supplier, last week marked its founding 30 years ago with an eye to further business growth and a vow to expand aggressively in the mainland.

'We plan to increase our headcount in China dramatically,' billionaire co-founder and chief executive Larry Ellison said when asked about Oracle's strategy in the mainland after addressing at the annual OracleWorld event in San Francisco.

Mr Ellison did not provide any financial commitments but described the mainland as a vital location where 'a lot of our research and development and other new initiatives are now taking place'.

Oracle, known by its Chinese name 'Jia Gu Wen', has 1,800 staff in 13 branches and 16 representative offices across the mainland.

'Our Chinese employee base will grow faster than in any country [where we operate],' Mr Ellison said.

Oracle is the third major multinational information technology firm to announce large-scale investments in the mainland in the past several weeks. Last month, networking equipment maker Cisco Systems said it had earmarked about US$16 billion in investments over the next five years. Enterprise data storage systems supplier EMC said it would double its spending on the mainland to US$1 billion for the same period.