Alibaba’s earnings soar as China’s love affair with online shopping continues
E-commerce giant raises annual revenue estimates after Q2 sales rise to US$8.3b. Now attention turns to Nov 11 and its Singles’ Day shopping festival, which is again expected to smash previous spending records
Alibaba Group has raised its full-year revenue estimates after beating analyst forecasts with a 61 per cent surge in second-quarter revenues.
The e-commerce giant is now predicting between a 49-53 per cent – up from 45-49 per cent – rise in annual revenue, after it invested an additional US$803 million in logistics affiliate Cainiao to attain a 51 per cent majority stake.
Alibaba’s July-September quarterly sales rose to 55.1 billion yuan (US$8.3 billion), surpassing the 52 billion yuan consensus estimate in a Bloomberg survey. Net income rocketed 146 per cent to 17.4 billion yuan during the period.
The result comes just under a week before it hosts what has become the world’s largest online shopping festival by value, its flagship “Singles’ Day”, which last year racked up a record US$17.8 billion worth of transactions in just 24 hours.
Most of the Hangzhou-based company’s revenue came from its core commerce business, which jumped 63 per cent compared with the same period last year, to 46.5 billion yuan.
That includes online marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, as well as Alibaba’s international business units including its western-facing shopping app AliExpress and Lazada, the Singapore-based e-commerce company in which Alibaba increased its stake to 83 per cent stake in June this year, which is focused on Southeast Asian sales.