Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    OFFICE buildings that are being built to house Alibaba’s southern headquarters for its cloud computing business opened Friday for lease, wooing technology and Internet finance firms to rent floors in one of the four buildings.

    Ali Center, opening for use at the end of the year, will be among the first batch of newly constructed buildings to be completed on the Houhai land facing Shenzhen Bay, a vast construction site at the time that the local government hopes one day to be a headquarters base for big firms and a future business center similar to Manhattan.

    Construction of the Alibaba buildings started in December 2011 and the Hangzhou-based group obtained the land with the promise to set up a regional headquarters there. At least two-thirds of the office floors are reserved for Alibaba’s own use.

    The largest e-commerce firm in China has decided that the T4 building will be used as a regional headquarters for its cloud computing business, the T1 and T3 buildings will probably be used for Alibaba’s other businesses and the T2 building, the tallest of the four with a total floor area of 30,000 square meters, is set for lease.

    Technology and Internet finance firms that share a similar vision as Alibaba are preferred and the rent is estimated at 180 yuan (US$28.2) per square meter per month, according to Jones Lang LaSalle’s Shenzhen division, the sole leasing agency for the project.

    “The rent is not high compared with a nearby building, SCC, which is also newly completed and rents for 330 yuan per square meter per month,” Sam Yao, an assistant manager at Jones Lang LaSalle’s Shenzhen division, told reporters.

    Built to be an interactive and smart facility, Ali Center now provides some high-tech services to make work and life convenient there. The services include a face recognition access control system and cloud printing. Parking, food orders and mail delivery can also be traced through its system.

    Neighboring Ali Center, more than a dozen buildings that will house headquarters for some influential Chinese companies are either planned or under construction. Houhai is not the only area in the city that is aimed at becoming a business center. The city is going to have six more central business districts (CBD) in years to come, including Bao’an CBD and Longgang CBD.