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Alibaba Group’s fourth-quarter revenue rose a better-than-expected 39 percent after China’s biggest e-commerce company drew in more users and boosted services to merchants on its platforms. Sales jumped to 24.2 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in the three months ended March, Alibaba ( BABA ) said. That compares with the 23.2 billion-yuan average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Adjusted earnings-per-share were 3.02 yuan compared with analyst projections for 3.52 yuan. Alibaba’s platforms, which link buyers and sellers, hit a 3 trillion yuan milestone of goods sold as the company continues to expand even as the Chinese economy grows at the slowest pace in 25 years. The online emporium is making more from mobile advertisements, deepening its push into rural domestic regions and branching out overseas to boost transactions. “Alibaba is still growing very nicely and sustaining very high margins in the face of the concerns about Chinese consumers and the face of competition,” said Gil Luria, an analyst with Wedbush Securities Inc. “It’s good results for Alibaba and it seems like their business is holding up.” Net income rose 85 percent to 5.3 billion yuan, just shy of the 5.4 billion-yuan average of estimates. Affiliate Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group, which owns Alipay, incurred a net loss after spending to drive user growth, the company said Thursday. Shares of Alibaba rose more than 4 percent in pre-market trading. The stock has dropped 6.7 percent this year compared with a 1.4 percent advance in the NYSE Composite Index. Revenue on Alibaba’s Chinese retail e-commerce platforms jumped 41 percent, driving growth in spending by merchants on the company’s marketing services. Commissions accounted for about a third of that. Alibaba has pulled out the stops to get its e-commerce platforms in front of villagers, setting up free Internet-equipped computers and working with local officials to train potential buyers and sellers. It had a presence in 12,000 villages across the country by the end of January, out of about 600,000. That effort to diversify the business comes as Alibaba is simultaneously trying to tap more of the 620 million Chinese who access the Internet from their smartphones and tablets. “The company was able to better monetize on selling advertisements to merchants,” Marie Sun, an analyst at Morningstar Investment Service, said before the earnings. “As the economy growth slows, it seems that merchants are more willing to place ads with bigger platforms like Alibaba that have a wider reach of customers.” The cloud computing business almost tripled revenue to more than 1 billion yuan and the business now has more than half a million paying customers. Scalper1 News
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