Alibaba reports better-than-expected quarterly revenue growth

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group late on Thursday confirmed its fastest quarterly revenue growth in more than a year, backed by its growing cloud computing business and AI investments.

Alibaba's revenue for the quarter ending Dec. 31 grew by 8 percent to 280.15 billion yuan (about 39 billion U.S. dollars) compared to the same period of the previous year, beating market expectations.

Notably, revenue from its cloud computing business logged the highest growth level in nearly two years, up 13 percent year on year to 31.74 billion yuan.

The growth of Alibaba Cloud has been primarily boosted by double-digit growth in public cloud revenue, with AI-related products achieving triple-digit year-on-year growth for the sixth consecutive quarter, according to Alibaba Cloud.

In addition, driven by overseas e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress and Trendyol, the revenue from international e-commerce in the quarter saw a rapid and significant year-on-year increase of 32 percent.

Analysts widely interpreted this revenue growth as signaling both a rebound in Alibaba's commercial business and notable advancements in artificial intelligence.

"We will continue to focus on three business categories -- domestic and international e-commerce, AI+cloud computing, and internet platform businesses. We are confident that our focused strategy will drive sustained solid growth for Alibaba Group," noted Eddie Wu, Alibaba Group's CEO, during an earnings call with investors and analysts. He also revealed that Alibaba will soon release a deep reasoning model built on Qwen2.5-Max.