Alibaba said on Wednesday that it would use part of its cash reserves to buy back B in outstanding shares.
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“We had a strong quarter and we continued to build the foundations for future growth”.
Sanderson models a miss on results, perhaps $3.36 billion and 56 cents, but it may not matter because “a softer quarter vs. Street has become the expectation and many analysts have lowered”.
Alibaba’s plunge in market value of about $100 billion, a decline bigger than Goldman Sachs Group, since November has been driven by a Chinese economy expanding at the weakest rate since 1990 and lawsuits concerning sales of counterfeit goods.
Revenue was RMB20,245 million (US$3,265 million), an increase of 28% year-over-year.
With sales growth slowing in China, Alibaba is looking across its borders to give sales a boost.
Sales on mobile devices made up more than half of Alibaba’s retail total for the first time.
“When we began investing in same-day delivery, people wrote us off as dead”, said a company spokesman in Beijing. “We focused our efforts on building healthy GMV growth, delivering the best consumer experience, and improving the quality and sustainability of merchants doing business on our marketplaces”.
The company said Wednesday that Macy’s will launch a store on Alibaba’s Tmall Global platform later this year.
The surprise move by China this week to devalue its yuan currency isn’t helping matters.
The numbers also follow closely on a number of other key announcements by Alibaba, all of which indicate an ongoing transformation of the giant group.
Announcing the partnership at a press conference, Alibaba’s executive chairman and founder Jack Massachusetts said that both e-commerce and traditional commerce sectors are suffering operating hardships and only through combining can they ensure viable operations.
Alibaba’s gross merchandise volume or GMV, representing the sum of all of the company’s online commerce transactions, increased 34 percent to 673 billion yuan. Mobile revenue from the China commerce retail business rose 352% to $846 million, or 40% of the company’s total China commerce retail business. A lot depends on what happens in the Chinese economy. Yahoo! shares were down by more than 4 percent at time of writing. Thousands of American products, including Converse Inc. sneakers and Procter & Gamble Co. toothpaste, are available to Chinese shoppers through Alibaba’s websites.
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Alibaba shares have fallen 26 percent since the beginning of the year, and were trading down 6.9 percent before the market open in New York on Wednesday.
