iSteelAsia to hire more staff

Steel trading portal iSteelAsia.com said yesterday it would buck a growing trend among Asian startups by hiring more staff instead of firing them.

"We're not cutting staff, we're actually hiring," Andrew Yao, Chief Executive of iSteelAsia.com, said at a news conference to launch his firm's new "second generation platform" with a unit of Intel Corp and Scient Corp. Drina Yue, Chief Operating Officer, said iSteelAsia planned on keeping its 86 staff members. In the past three and half months, some 750 people have a lost their jobs from local Internet start-ups.