Alibaba Logs Slowest Revenue Growth Amid ‘Volatile Market Environment’
LONDON — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group logged its slowest quarterly revenue growth since listing in 2014.
Impacted by China’s continuous crackdown on the tech sector, and facing competition from the likes of JD.com, ByteDance and Kuaishou, which have doubled down on livestreaming selling, Alibaba Group’s revenue in the quarter ended Dec. 31 rose about 10 percent to 242.6 billion renminbi, or $38.37 billion.
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Alibaba’s net profit plunged 75 percent to 19.43 billion renminbi, or $3 billion, in the period.
Income from operations saw a 86 percent decrease year-over-year to 7.06 billion renminbi, or $1.11 billion.
Revenue from the China commerce retail business, which included its core Taobao and Tmall business, increased 7 percent to 168 billion renminbi, or $26 billion, from a year ago.
Customer management revenue, a metric that tracks how much money merchants spend on ads and promotions on Alibaba’s sites, decreased by 1 percent year-over-year. Alibaba said the decrease was because of the slowing market conditions as well as competition.
Cloud computing, the second largest source of revenue for Alibaba, came in at 19.5 billion renminbi, or $3.06 billion, a 20 percent year-over-year increase.
Worldwide annual active consumers of Alibaba increased 43 million in the past 12 months to 1.28 billion (979 million consumers in China and 301 million consumers overseas).
Alibaba’s shares closed down 6.9 percent in Hong Kong and fell about 5 percent in New York before the results were announced. The Hangzhou-based company’s share price have fallen about 60 percent in the past 12 months.
Despite the downfall, Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, said the group delivered steady progress “in a complex and volatile market environment.”
“We achieved positive momentum in key strategic businesses through a disciplined focus on capacity building and value creation to fuel our future growth,” Zhang added.
Maggie Wu, chief financial officer of Alibaba Group, called the 10 percent revenue growth a “healthy” result.
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