Chinese online giant Alibaba's employees at an industry exhibition booth in Shanghai. [Photo/China Daily]

SHANGHAI - Alibaba.com Ltd, China's largest e-commerce company, posted a record net profit for the third-quarter as revenue from value-added services buffered slowing subscriber growth, but warned of easing growth as China's exports cool.

Alibaba.com, a unit of Alibaba Group, which is 40 percent owned by Yahoo! Inc, sees its top line closely tied to China's exports as its website connects millions of international buyers with Chinese suppliers.

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"China's export growth in the coming quarters may continue to moderate, growing at a slower rate than we saw in previous quarters," the company said in comments accompanying the results on Thursday.

Alibaba.com's July-September profit rose 55 percent to 366 million yuan ($55 million) from a 236 million yuan a year earlier. That beat an average forecast of 344.8 million yuan from seven analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company said its paying members rose 29.7 percent year-on-year, and were up 5.3 percent quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter to 750,937. It has flagged slowing member growth in recent months, and said it will try to offset the slowdown by selling more services to existing members.

Alibaba.com competes with Global Sources Ltd in China's 1.7 billion yuan business-to-business online marketplace industry.

Total revenue grew 40 percent to 1.45 billion yuan during the quarter. Deferred revenue and customer advances for the quarter, a key measurement of future performance, rose 30 percent.

Web commerce in China has surged as buyers tap the Internet for better deals from more suppliers in the nation's highly fragmented distribution networks.

Alibaba.com's shares closed 0.4 percent higher before its results were released. They are down about 16 percent this year, underperforming the 13 percent rise in the Hang Seng Index .

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, was in the spotlight earlier this week when sources told Reuters he had been approached about joining a private equity group considering a bid to buy Yahoo, and that Ma himself was weighing setting up a special fund to buy the 40 percent of his company held by Yahoo.