Growth in cloud and e-commerce drives Alibaba quarter revenue up 10%

Alibaba Group has reported its latest quarterly earnings for the period ended 31 December 2021, the first since the company unveiled its major restructuring plans at the start of December.

Under the restructure, the Chinese internet giant has split its global and domestic e-commerce business into two separate units. During the restructure announcement, Alibaba said it would focus its investment on the “two strategic pillars” to better drive synergies across its consumer and wholesale commerce platforms in China as well as internationally.

Starting this quarter, the company has updated its segment reporting to reflect this restructure, which now includes China commerce, international commerce, local consumer services, Cainaio, cloud, digital media and entertainment, and innovation initiatives and others.

Overall, for this quarter, the Chinese giant reported revenue came in at 242.5 million yuan ($38 million), an increase of 10% year-on-year, which the company attributed to growth experienced by its China commerce, cloud, local consumer services, and international commerce segments.

“We have always innovated and invested for the long term throughout Alibaba’s history. As demonstrated by our new segmental disclosure, our continued investments in growth initiatives have seen tangible results,” said outgoing Alibaba Group CFO Maggie Wu. 

Alibaba’s cloud revenue was $3 million, up 20% from a year ago. The company said this was underpinned by growth from financial and telecommunication industries but was offset by “a top cloud customer’s decision to stop using our overseas cloud services for its international business due to non-product related requirements and slowing demand from customers in the Internet industry such as online entertainment and education”.

China commerce, which continue to make up the largest share of total revenue, was 7% higher than last year reaching $27 million. The company’s local consumer services segment experienced the largest increase in the quarter of 27% year-on-year to $1.9 million, and international commerce achieved $2.58 million, following an 18% jump on the prior corresponding period.

“Alibaba delivered steady progress this quarter as we continued to execute our multi-engine growth strategy in a complex and volatile market environment,” Alibaba group chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang said.

“We achieved positive momentum in key strategic businesses through a disciplined focus on capacity building and value creation to fuel our future growth.”

The company’s global annual active consumers reached 1.28 billion for the 12 months by the end of the year, following an increase of approximately 43 million during the quarter, which included 979 million consumers in China and 301 million consumers overseas. 

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