KUALA LUMPUR, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Alibaba Group's new Malaysia office, also its first country office in Southeast Asia, came into operation on Monday, as the Chinese tech giant continues its overseas expansion in the Southeast Asian region.

Alibaba, having already established the first international eHub under the Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) initiative, aims to use the office to better serve the needs of local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and help the new Malaysian government train more young talents, said Jack Ma, Alibaba founder and executive chairman at the launch ceremony.

In an interview before the ceremony, Ma told Xinhua that Alibaba plans to deepen its localization in Malaysia, and in the process it will hire more local people, perhaps more than 1,000 in the future.

He said Alibaba's investment here in recent years has reached more than 100 million U.S. dollars.

Alibaba has been expanding its presence in Malaysia in recent years. Aside from eWTP, Alibaba also established a Cloud computing data center, brought its mobile payment service Alipay and have trained thousands of individuals, entrepreneurs and cloud computing professionals under various programs.

Before the ceremony, Jack Ma met with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who took power after winning the May 9 election. "We had a good exchange of ideas on a wide range of subjects," Mahathir said in a twitter post shortly after the meeting.

Jack Ma said during the meeting with the PM, which lasted for about an hour, Mahathir said he welcomes Alibaba to come to Malaysia and train more people in the digital age.

Ma also announced the launch of Malaysia Week in July to promote a broad range of Malaysian products and services to Chinese consumers.