Alibaba now has half a billion users

Photo credit: Alibaba.

Jack Ma’s online shopping empire now has 493 million users who access its China marketplaces every month on mobile devices, up from 393 million at the end of 2015, said Alibaba today in its latest earnings report.

The Taobao and Tmall marketplaces now have 443 million annual active buyers, rising strongly from 407 million 12 months ago. Alibaba makes the equivalent of US$35 in revenue from each shopper.

The new figures come amidst a strong performance for Alibaba in the quarter from October to December 2016 in which it pulled in US$2.5 billion net income from total revenue – up 54 percent in the past year – of US$7.7 billion. The ecommerce behemoth beat analyst expectations with plenty of legroom.

US trade

Alibaba, which no longer reports quarterly consumer spending on its marketplaces, also heralded fast growing revenues from newer areas, such as corporate cloud computing services – in which it competes against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure – and digital media. Alibaba owns Youku, China’s top streaming site, after a US$4.4 billion acquisition in October 2015.

Despite all those new segments, Alibaba still rustles up 87.5 percent of its revenue from online shopping.

As more Chinese shoppers seek out goods shipped in from overseas, Alibaba saw its international retail business surge 288 percent to US$357.5 million. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and chairman, met with President Trump just before the inauguration to discuss cross-border trade as he seeks to bring more US-made goods direct to China’s consumers through his marketplaces.

“In 2017, 19.1 percent of the population in China will make purchases from abroad worth US$110.68 billion,” said the analysts at Emarketer today.

Watch: Ma talks shop with Trump

Converted from Chinese yuan. Rate: US$1 = RMB 6.86.

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-revenues-q4-2016
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