Alibaba Q4 profit nearly triples

Alibaba Group has more than doubled its net profit for its fourth quarter compared to the same period in previous year.

For the three months ended December, net income was up 171 percent at US$642.2 million while revenue rose 80 percent to US$1.84 billion, according to a regulatory filing by stakeholder Yahoo. The U.S. Web giant owns about 24 percent of Alibaba, about half of what it held before the Chinese firm bought back some of its shares for US$7.6 billion last September.

Last week Alibaba clinched an US$8 billion loan from nine banks to refinance its debt and raise funds, amid rising speculation that it was preparing an initial public offering which could value the company at US$62.5 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates. 

The Web giant has been making a push into the mobile business, most recently paying US$586 million for an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like service with 46.2 million daily active users of which a large majority access the service over their mobiles.

Last month, Alibaba outlined new plans beef up the ecosystem around its cloud-based mobile Aliyun OS, which it rebranded as Alibaba Mobile Operating System (AMOS). The company announced five additional Chinese handset makers were launching phones running its mobile OS, in addition to the existing two.