SHANGHAI - Walmart, the world's leading retailer, announced on Monday that it is setting up an e-commerce hub in Shanghai to handle the group's online business operations in China.

It will be Walmart's second e-commerce hub in the world after the one in New York.

Barry Friedman, vice president of Walmart China, said such an arrangement signals that e-commerce would be a focus in Walmart's future operations in China. He said the scale of China's online businesses is expected to rival that of the United States in a few years.

Walmart said it would introduce its management experience on combining retail and e-commerce to Shanghai, training local e-commerce professionals with the government and deploying Walmart's top-tier e-commerce talents to work in the Shanghai hub.

China's online business has experienced a boom in recent years. In Shanghai, goods and services valued 409.5 billion yuan ($63 billion) were traded on the Internet in 2010. The revenue of online shopping accounted for about 5.72 percent of the total retailing revenue, government statistics show.

Entering the China market in 1996, Walmart currently operates a number of store formats in China. As of June 2011, Walmart had 339 store units in 124 Chinese cities and about one third of the units were set up in the past six months.