It figures, as the WSJ explains, to be another banner year for the massive Chinese e-commerce player.
Buoyed by China’s insatiable online shoppers, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. posted a strong third quarter, raised its revenue outlook and said it would step up investments to expand its digital media and cloud businesses.
Alibaba, which runs China’s most popular e-commerce websites Taobao and Tmall, said Tuesday that fiscal year 2017 sales would rise 53%, up from an earlier forecast of 48%. The Chinese e-commerce giant is riding the wave in the country’s online retail growth as internet purchases continue to outstrip overall retail sales.
Alibaba’s mobile monthly active users rose 25% to 493 million, helping mobile revenue from the China commerce retail business surge 73% from a year ago.
Alicloud, Alibaba’s cloud-computing arm, more than doubled its revenue in the third quarter to $254 million, following similar growth the quarter before. Alicloud is China’s largest provider of cloud services. Alibaba said the unit, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, has 765,000 paying customers, up from 651,000 in the previous quarter.
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