By Ong Boon Kiat

GOOGLE is poised to lift its Singapore headcount in a big way soon. The Internet search giant is also seeking to strike deals with content providers in Singapore over its YouTube online video service.

In an interview with BizIT, Google's Asia-Pacific vice-president of sales and operations Daniel Alegre said that the company now has around 250 new job openings across the region.

He said that Singapore is expected to get 'one in five' of the new planned hires - or 50 new staff.

It will be a major headcount expansion for Google's Shenton Way office, which currently has over 100 staff and supports the company's various regional businesses.

'When we opened our Singapore office in 2007, we had a seeding team. In 2008, we did a significant acceleration in headcount,' Mr Alegre said. 'Now, what we really want to do is to grow the support operations in Singapore, as well as have a much stronger presence across the region.'

The new hires will cover a variety of job functions, including engineering, sales, marketing, human resource, administration and finance.

Google has around 20,000 full-time employees worldwide as at end-2009.

The ramp-up is to keep up with the expected bullish growth in Google's advertising and enterprise businesses across Asia-Pacific, where the company is growing the fastest. According to Mr Alegre, businesses worldwide are now starting to re-invest in marketing, and many are even expected to double and triple their advertising budget this year.

He noted that online advertising in the Asia-Pacific region is growing at 15 per cent yearly, and should reach 10 per cent of all advertising expenditure this year.

'Significantly more advertising dollars are coming into the market, including for Singapore - which we are already seeing. We are seeing increased spend across every single sector, from the highest-spending accounts to the SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses).'

Added Mr Alegre: 'We want to make sure that we are properly staffed to service our advertisers across the region.

'It shows our commitment to Singapore. The calibre of workforce here is like nothing I've come across, which made our growth plans much easier. We see this as a pivotal part of our Asia-Pacific strategy.'

Besides searching for new employees here, Google is also seeking to strike deals with content providers here for its YouTube video service.

Mr Alegre said that Google is currently talking to a number of them over tie-ups similar to the one which Google inked recently with the Indian Premier League (IPL) to stream live cricket matches from IPL's current season over the YouTube website.

This deal, which marked the first time that a major sporting event is being live-streamed across the world, kicked off last week and has racked up millions of views from across the world.

Mr Alegre said that Google is now talking with content providers from different countries around the world, including those from Singapore, for tie-ups of a similar nature in which content providers get a cut of the advertising revenue that Google earns from showing their content.

'Our strategy is that we want to have as much content as possible on Youtube. From a monetisation perspective, we want to make sure we have licensed content so that we can put advertisements against them,' he said.

This article was first published in The Business Times.