The Chinese e-commerce company saw its sales hit 80.92 billion Ren Min Bi (RMB), the equivalent of $12.2 billion, for the latest quarter. This was well ahead of market estimates, including those made by Bloomberg, as TechCrunch has reported. Alibaba also registered net profit of 8.7 billion RMB (or $1.3 billion).
Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational e-commerce, retail, Internet, AI and technology conglomerate. The digital based company provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services.
Profits at Alibaba would have been higher had the Chinese company not recently purchased and undertaken a significant refinancing of Ant Financial. Ant Financial is a financial services firm that operates the Alipay mobile payment service. The company has undertaken a large financing deal to raise $9 billion on the market. The money will be used for money global expansion, taking the company outside of Chinese markets. Ant Financial is the highest valued fintech company in the world, and the world’s most valuable unicorn (start-up) company, with a valuation of $150 billion.
With the new market data, Alibaba’s primary e-commerce business remains the most lucrative. Second to this is the company’s cloud computing business, which has also shown strong growth.
