Alibaba’s Quarterly Revenue Hits $38B, Up 10% YoY

Chinese tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group announced its financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2021. Its revenue in the period reached 242.58 billion yuan ($38 billion), a year-on-year increase of 10%. However, its net income and non-GAAP net income showed year-on-year decreases of 75% and 25%, respectively.

Meanwhile, Alibaba‘s income from operations decreased by 34% year-on-year, and its adjusted EBITA decreased 27% year-onoyear. According to the firm, the decrease was primarily due to its increased investments in growth initiatives and increased spending for user growth, as well as support provided to merchants.

It is worth mentioning that Alibaba calculated the revenue of different divisions under the new organizational structure for the first time in its financial report. The total revenue was primarily driven by growth of China’s commerce segment by 7% year-on-year to 172 billion yuan, the cloud segment by 20% year-on-year to 19.5 billion yuan, the local consumer services segment by 27% year-on-year to 12.14 billion yuan, and the international commerce segment by 18% year-on-year to 16.45 billion yuan.

On the user side, the financial report shows that annual active consumers of the Alibaba Ecosystem across the world reached approximately 1.28 billion for the twelve months ended December 31, 2021, an increase of approximately 43 million from the twelve months ended September 30, 2021. This includes 979 million consumers in China and 301 million consumers overseas, representing quarterly net increases of over 26 million and 16 million, respectively.

Alibaba‘s international commerce retail business, which is mainly comprised of Lazada, AliExpress, Trendyol and Daraz, grew strongly and achieved about 301 million annual active consumers in the twelve months ended December 31, 2021, representing a quarterly net increase of 16 million.

In the domestic commercial sector, Taobao Deals and Taocaicai, as important components of the business matrix in China’s retail market, complement Taobao. During the quarter, paid orders on Taobao Deals grew strongly at over 100% year-over-year, while Taocaicai’s GMV increased by 30% quarter-on-quarter.

In the December quarter, revenue from Cainiao before inter-segment elimination grew 23% year-on-year to 19.6 billion yuan. The daily average package volume delivered through its global delivery network exceeded 5 million. During the quarter, Cainiao commenced operations of four self-operated sorting centers in Western Europe, making a total of seven self-operated sorting centers in the region.

Alibaba‘s revenue from its cloud business increased by 19% year-on-year to 26.43 billion yuan. Alibaba Cloud continues to ramp up its international presence and has added two data centers in the Asia Pacific region, one in South Korea and the other in Thailand. Currently, Alibaba Cloud offers computing services in 25 regions globally, including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and the UAE.

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In terms of investment in scientific research, Alibaba‘s product development expenses in the the quarter were 15.7 billion yuan, compared with 13.6 billion yuan in the same period in 2020. At the same time, Alibaba continued to push forward its share repurchase plan. During the quarter ended December 31, 2021, it repurchased approximately 10.1 million of its ADSs. For the nine months ended December 31, 2021, Alibaba repurchased approximately 42.2 million of its ADSs for $7.7 billion.