Alibaba Group and Tencent Announce March Quarter 2019 Financial Results

On May 15th, Alibaba Group announced their financial results for the quarter and fiscal year that ended in March 31, 2019. Their announcement coincided with that of Tencent, who also launched the financial results for the first quarter 2019.

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In this last quarter, the total revenue of Alibaba reached RMB93,498 million ($13,932 million), an increase of 51% year-over-year. In comparison, Tencent‘s total revenue is RMB85,470 million, with a year-over-year increase of 16%.

As for net income, the former achieved RMB25,830 million yuan ($3,849 million), compared to the RMB27,210 million yuan of the latter.

Tencent‘s financial report also shows that the total number of monthly active users on WeChat has achieved RMB1.112 billion, with a year-over-year increase of 6.9%.

As for Alibaba, the total annual number of consumers using its Chinese retail marketplaces reached RMB654 million, an increase of 18 million from the previous 12-month period. Mobile MAUs on its Chinese retail marketplaces reached RMB721 million in March 2019, an increase of RMB22 million over December 2018.

It is worth mentioning that fintech has been a major growth point for both companies. Tencent announced that starting from this quarter, it will separately cover fintech and corporate service data separately in its financial reports. Revenues generated by this part of their business accounts for 25% of the total, lagging behind its gaming and social network revenues, that make up 57%. According to Tencent, this growth is mainly driven by commercial payments, other financial technology services (such as micro-finance) and cloud business.

For Alibaba, core commerce revenue grew 54% year-on-year in the March quarter. Tmall continued to gain wallet share and grow faster than the industry average, with Tmall paid physical goods gross merchandise volume (GMV) up 33% year-on-year. With over 100 luxury brands on the Tmall Luxury Pavilion, new brands like Alexander McQueen and Mulberry also join the Luxury Pavilion as well as opening Tmall flagship stores

It is reported that apart from online retail, Alipay is also major a major driver for growth. According to QuestMobile’s data report, Alipay ranked second in the ranking of Mobile Apps by the number of users in March this year, with an increase of 130 million year-on-year and a growth rate of 24.3%. The 2019 Mobile Market Report by AppAnnie shows that Alipay has become the world’s top non-social app.