China’s Alibaba Grinds Out Small Gains in a Year of U-Turns

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce and entertainment industry giant, delivered single-figure increases in annual revenue and net profits for the financial year running from April 2023 to March 2024.

Revenue increased by 8% to RMB941 billion ($130 billion). Net income was up 9% to RMB71.3 billion ($9.88 billion).

The figures follow a year when the company backtracked on many of its plans. This time last year, it announced plans to create a holding company and break itself into six operating companies that would have a high degree of independence, even raising their own finance or heading for separate IPOs. CEO Daniel Zhang stepped down as CEO and took over the cloud computing unit. Two of the IPOs – cloud computing and logistics – were announced, but then scrapped.

This followed a period where China’s top tech firms came under extreme pressure from regulators, co-founder Jack Ma went into exile, and competitors in shopping became serious rivals.

“This quarter’s results demonstrate that our strategies are working and we are returning to growth. Our China and international commerce businesses realized double-digit year-over-year gross merchandise value growth through our focus on the customer experience. We are also excited by the accelerated growth of customers and cloud computing revenues related to our AI products. We will remain focused on our strategic priorities and capture future growth opportunities,” said Eddie Wu, -

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CEO of Alibaba Group.

Revenue at the group’s ‘Digital Media and Entertainment Group’ was RMB21.1billion ($2.93 billion) in fiscal year 2024, an increase of 15% compared to RMB18.4 billion in fiscal year 2023, primarily driven by the strong revenue growth of offline entertainment businesses of Alibaba Pictures. The unit’s adjusted earnings before interest tax and appreciation came in as a loss of RMB1.54 billion ($213 million), compared to a loss of RMB2.79 billion in fiscal year 2023. Losses were reduced year-over-year primarily due to the increase in profitability of Alibaba Pictures.

In the Jan-March fourth quarter, the media unit recorded a loss of RMB884 million ($122 million), compared to a loss of RMB1.13 billion in the same quarter of 2023. The company said that the improvement was “primarily due to the reduced loss of Youku.” Alibaba does not disclose data such as subscriber numbers, average revenue per user or monthly active users for the streamer.

At the group level, Alibaba took impairment and good will charges against Sun Art, a retail chain that it acquired, and one of $1.2 billion against Youku.

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