Signage for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. displayed at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. Alibaba’s annual 11.11 Singles’ Day online shopping bonanza, one that draws in hundreds of millions of people across the globe, is a more low-key affair this year as the e-commerce giant seeks to turn the focus away from increasing sales and more toward sustainability and philanthropy — key pillars of President Xi Jinping’s drive to reshape China’s economy.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
GUANGZHOU, China — Alibaba on Thursday missed revenue and earnings expectations for the September quarter, as slowing economic growth in China and the country’s crackdown on its technology companies weighed on results.
Here’s how Alibaba did in its fiscal second-quarter, versus Refinitiv consensus estimates:
- Revenue: 200.69 billion yuan ($31.4 billion) vs. 204.93 billion yuan estimated, a 29% year-on-year rise.
- EPS: 11.20 yuan vs. 12.36 yuan estimated, a 38% year-on-year decline.
Alibaba has been a victim of China’s crackdown on its domestic technology industry which has seen a slew of new regulation brought in from antitrust to data protection.
While China’s tech giants have grown largely unencumbered over the past few years, Beijing has looked to clean up some of the behaviors of its corporates. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion in April as part of an anti-monopoly probe.
Meanwhile, China’s economy slowed down in the third quarter of the year.
Expectations were low coming into the fiscal second-quarter earnings report as a result, with analysts expecting it to be one of the most challenging quarters ever for the Chinese e-commerce giant.
The company is coming off the back of Singles Day, a huge shopping event in China where e-commerce platforms push heavy discounts and rack up billions of dollars of sales.
Alibaba raked in gross merchandise volume during the 11-day period totaling 540.3 billion yuan ($84.54 billion). Any revenue Alibaba gets from this event will not be reflected in the September quarter.
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