The Alibaba Group announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2019. The Chinese marketplace giant reported a better-than-expected 40% rise in revenue, powered by strong growth in its e-commerce and cloud computing businesses. Year-on-year, an adjusted 39% growth is reported.
“Alibaba Group celebrated its 20th anniversary in September, marking an important milestone on our 102-year journey to make it easy to do business anywhere,” said Daniel Zhang, Executive Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group. “We aim to serve over one billion annual active consumers and help our merchants achieve over RMB10 trillion in annual gross merchandise volume by end of fiscal 2024. We will continue to invest in the user experience and innovative technology to create new value for consumers, as well as the millions of enterprises undergoing digital transformation in the new digital economy.”
In September 2019, the Chinese retail marketplaces of Alibaba Group (Taobao, Tmall etc.) had 785 million mobile MAUs, representing a quarterly net increase of 30 million. Annual active consumers on the Chinese retail marketplaces reached 693 million for the 12 months ended September 30, 2019, compared to 674 million for the 12 months ended June 30, 2019. The company’s net income attributable to ordinary shareholders rose to 72.54 billion yuan from 20.03 billion yuan a year earlier, due to a one-time gain related to its stake in Ant Financial.
Alibaba, the largest e-commerce company in China, and its main rival JD.com have been looking to diversify their activities as online sales slow in saturated markets in China’s biggest cities. Pinduoduo is also taking a stand, attracting more first-time consumers to the platform. Amongst other concerns is the consumer confidence that takes hits from the ongoing U.S.-China trade war.
