Alibaba Beats Q2 Estimates as Revenue Soars

Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group today announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2019. The company saw a robust total revenue growth of 40% year-on-year and a rise in mobile MAUs (monthly active users) to 785 million.

“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 10 trillion yuan in annual gross merchandise volume by end of fiscal 2024.”

“We delivered a strong quarter with revenue growth of 40% and adjusted EBITDA (Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) up 39% year-over-year,” said Maggie Wu, Chief Financial Officer of Alibaba Group. “With sustained consumer engagement and spending across the Alibaba Economy, we have continued our revenue and profit growth, as well as strong free cash flow that enable us to invest in long-term growth.”

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In September 2019, the company’s China retail marketplaces had 785 million mobile MAUs, marking a quarterly net increase of 30 million. Annual active consumers across Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces reached 693 million for the 12 months ended September 30, 2019, with the company’s Taobao shopping app leading the pack.

By leveraging data technology, Taobao has incubated new community-based and content-driven features such as Idle Fish, its active C2C community and marketplace with over 1.3 million interest-based communities and 60 million active sellers.

In the six months ended September 30, 2019, Taobao’s DAU (daily active users) growth accelerated as a result of healthy organic traffic growth, as well as effective user targeting and engagement with interactive and entertainment features.

Alibaba added that in the fiscal year 2019, over 50% of merchants on Tmall leveraged live streaming to engage with their customers. Alibaba said that each of these features generated over 100 billion yuan in annual GMV.

The company also recently kicked off its annual 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, with this year’s focus centered on catalyzing demand for new brands and products, as well as supporting the ongoing consumption upgrade across China.

Over 200,000 brands, including more than 22,000 brands on Tmall Global are due to participate in this year’s major shopping festival. According to Alibaba, about 1,000 brands and merchants have upgraded to Tmall Flagship Store 2.0, which enables brands to develop sustainable engagement with their customers through interactive and personalized content, as well as integrated online and offline services.