Alibaba forecasts slowing revenue growth for fiscal 2022
Cyber Week Guide 2021
Alibaba said annual revenue growth will slow amid weak China demand, but its cloud unit continues to gain traction.
The e-commerce giant said fiscal 2022 revenue would grow by 20% to 23%, well off its pace in recent years. Alibaba reported fiscal second-quarter results that were mixed at best. The earnings weren't too surprising given Alibaba's lackluster growth from its annual Singles' Day sale.
In addition, China has cracked down on its large technology companies led by Alibaba and Tencent.
For the second quarter, Alibaba reported revenue of $31.15 billion, up 29% from a year ago. Alibaba's cloud computing revenue was $3.1 billion, up 33% from a year ago. Net income for the second quarter was $524 million, or 31 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings for the second quarter were 22 cents a share.
In fiscal 2019, Alibaba posted revenue growth of more than 50%. In fiscal 2020, revenue growth slowed to 35.3% before rebounding to nearly 41% in fiscal 2021.
Recent Alibaba headlines include:
- Alibaba Cloud to build own servers with new in-house chip
- Alibaba boasts greener 11.11 shopping event help cut computing usage by half
- Alibaba reports 'steady' number of merchandise sold during 11.11 shopping event
- Alibaba to hold annual 11.11 shopping event in a new Chinese operating environment
CEO Daniel Zhang said the company was focused on the Chinese domestic market, globalization and cloud computing. Alibaba has 1.24 billion active consumers in its ecosystem, "and we are on track to achieve our longer-term target of serving two billion consumers globally," said Zhang.
Alibaba said it saw strong growth from the internet, financial services, and retail companies for the cloud business. The company highlighted its in-house Yitian 710 Server Chip and architecture to improve its latency as well as its database and open source efforts.