Alibaba's first quarter revenue fell 4% to $33.47 billion amid tough e-commerce competition, but its cloud business picked up momentum.
The company reported first quarter earnings of $3.34 billion, down 27% from a year ago. Alibaba is facing competition from rivals such as PDD and JD.com. Alibaba has had success with its Alibaba International Digital Commerce (AIDC) business, which includes retail and wholesale marketplaces including Lazada, AliExpress, Trendyol, Daraz, Miravia and Alibaba.com. First quarter revenue for AIDC was up 32% from a year ago.
Even though Alibaba's various e-commerce businesses were mixed the Cloud Intelligence Group gained a bit of momentum after a few quarters of flat growth. First quarter revenue for the cloud unit was $3.65 billion, up 6% from a year ago.
Alibaba said it saw "double-digit public cloud growth and increasing adoption of AI-related products." AI-related product revenue grew at a triple-digit pace. The company said it "will continue to invest in customers and technology, particularly in AI infrastructure, to increase cloud adoption for AI and maintain our market leadership."
In the quarter, Alibaba released Qwen 2.0, a series of large language models.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said:
"In our cloud segment, we continue to pursue high-quality revenue and effectively execute our integrated cloud plus AI development strategy. This quarter, Alibaba's overall revenue, excluding Alibaba consolidated subsidiaries, grew 6%, with public cloud revenue maintaining double-digit growth. AI-related product revenues sustained a triple digit growth continuing to increase its share of public cloud revenue. We're seeing more major customers choosing Alibaba Cloud as their computer infrastructure for AI development. At the same time, Alibaba's proprietary large language models are gaining wider adoption.
We'll strengthen synergies between cloud and AI products, not only supporting existing customers and implementing new AI capabilities on Alibaba Cloud, but also enabling AI native enterprises to scale and succeed on our platform. We're committed to capitalizing on both opportunities.
Three, we'll continue to invest in R&D and AI CapEx to ensure the growth of our AI-driven cloud business."
