HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--$BABA #alibaba--Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE: BABA and HKEX: 9988, “Alibaba” or “Alibaba Group”) today announced its financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2023.

“In an increasingly complex world, we have proactively transformed our organization to strengthen the competitiveness of our businesses through greater independence to address the evolving needs of different customers and capture new opportunities,” said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group. “We are taking concrete steps towards unlocking value from our businesses and are pleased to announce that our board has approved a full spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group via a stock dividend distribution to shareholders, with intention for it to become an independent publicly listed company.”

“We have established a capital management committee at the Alibaba board level to undertake a comprehensive capital management plan to enhance shareholder value. Alibaba is committed to improving shareholders’ return through the implementation of a robust capital allocation framework,” said Toby Xu, Chief Financial Officer of Alibaba Group. “We are delighted to share that our board has approved the process to start external financing for Alibaba International Digital Commerce Business Group; exploration of IPO for Cainiao Smart Logistics Group; and execution of IPO for Freshippo.”

BUSINESS HIGHLIGHTS

In the quarter ended March 31, 2023:

• Revenue was RMB208,200 million (US$30,316 million), an increase of 2% year-over-year.
• Income from operations was RMB15,240 million (US$2,219 million), a decrease of 9% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of an item discussed in “March Quarter Other Financial Results — Income from operations and operating margin” below, income from operations would have increased by RMB11,569 million year-over-year. Adjusted EBITA, a non-GAAP measurement, increased by 60% or RMB9,469 million year-over-year to RMB25,280 million (US$3,681 million), primarily due to an increase in China commerce adjusted EBITA, as well as narrowed adjusted EBITA losses of Local consumer services and Digital media and entertainment.
• Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders was RMB23,516 million (US$3,424 million). Net income was RMB21,996 million (US$3,203 million), compared to net loss of RMB18,357 million in the same quarter last year, primarily due to net gains arising from the increases in the market prices of our equity investments in publicly-traded companies, compared to net losses from these investments in the same quarter last year, partly offset by the decrease in share of profit of equity method investees, the increase in impairment of investments and the decrease in income from operations as mentioned above. Except for the share of profit of equity method investees, we excluded these investment related net gains or losses from our non-GAAP measures. Non-GAAP net income was RMB27,375 million (US$3,986 million), an increase of 38% year-over-year.
• Diluted earnings per ADS was RMB9.00 (US$1.31) and diluted earnings per share was RMB1.12 (US$0.16 or HK$1.28). Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS was RMB10.71 (US$1.56), an increase of 35% year-over-year and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was RMB1.34 (US$0.20 or HK$1.53), an increase of 35% year-over-year.
• Net cash provided by operating activities was RMB31,401 million (US$4,572 million). Free cash flow, a non-GAAP measurement of liquidity, was RMB32,267 million (US$4,698 million).

In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023:

• Revenue was RMB868,687 million (US$126,491 million), an increase of 2% year-over-year.
• Income from operations was RMB100,351 million (US$14,612 million), an increase of 44% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of certain items discussed in “Full Fiscal Year Other Financial Results — Income from operations and operating margin” below, income from operations would have increased by RMB24,143 million year-over-year. Adjusted EBITA, a non-GAAP measurement, increased 13% or RMB17,514 million year-over-year to RMB147,911 million (US$21,538 million), primarily due to narrowed adjusted EBITA losses of Local consumer services, International commerce and Digital media and entertainment, as well as an increase in China commerce adjusted EBITA.
• Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders was RMB72,509 million (US$10,558 million) and net income was RMB65,573 million (US$9,548 million), showing year-over-year increases of 17% and 39%, respectively, primarily due to the increase in income from operations and the decrease in net losses arising from changes in the fair values of our equity investments, partly offset by the decrease in share of profit of equity method investees and the increase in impairment of investments. We excluded net gains or losses arising from the changes in fair value and impairment of our investments from our non-GAAP measures. Non-GAAP net income was RMB141,379 million (US$20,586 million), an increase of 4% year-over-year.
• Diluted earnings per ADS was RMB27.46 (US$4.00) and diluted earnings per share was RMB3.43 (US$0.50 or HK$3.92). Non-GAAP diluted earnings per ADS was RMB54.56 (US$7.94), an increase of 4% year-over-year and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was RMB6.82 (US$0.99 or HK$7.79), an increase of 4% year-over-year.
• Net cash provided by operating activities was RMB199,752 million (US$29,086 million). Free cash flow, a non-GAAP measurement of liquidity, was RMB171,663 million (US$24,996 million).

Reconciliations of GAAP measures to non-GAAP measures presented above are included at the end of this results announcement.

BUSINESS AND STRATEGIC UPDATES

China Commerce

China commerce segment mainly includes our China commerce retail businesses such as Taobao, Tmall, Taobao Deals, Taocaicai, Freshippo, Tmall Supermarket, Sun Art, Tmall Global and Alibaba Health, as well as wholesale businesses including 1688.com.

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, online physical goods GMV on Taobao and Tmall, excluding unpaid orders, declined mid-single-digit year-over-year. China’s consumption gradually recovered throughout the quarter ended March 31, 2023. In the month of March, online physical goods GMV growth on Taobao and Tmall, excluding unpaid orders, turned positive, driven by strong growth of fashion & accessories and healthcare categories.

We remain focused on improving the customer value proposition of our Taobao app by (i) increasing media content that strengthens consumer engagement, (ii) being more price competitive through more effective targeting and introduction of new marketing features and (iii) catering to consumers’ time-sensitive needs for high-frequency everyday necessities through our neighborhood retail businesses. In April, we started testing a new interface for Taobao app that aims at increasing front page exposure for livestreaming, channels for price competitive products and neighborhood shopping categories.

Taobao Deals, our value-for-money platform, continues to enrich product supply and enhance digital consumption experience for price sensitive consumers. For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, paid GMV of M2C products grew 26% year-over-year on Taobao and Taobao Deals. Taocaicai continues to drive category penetration in high purchase frequency categories of groceries and fresh produce on our China retail marketplaces. For the twelve months ended March 31, 2023, 62% of Taocaicai’s annual active consumers were first-time fresh produce buyers on our various platforms. During the quarter, both Taobao Deals and Taocaicai continued to narrow losses year-over-year.

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, our direct sales and others revenue was RMB71,788 million (US$ 10,453 million), decreasing slightly by 1% year-over-year, mainly due to decrease in offline store sales, which was negatively affected by COVID-19 disruption in January and seasonal volatility from an earlier Chinese New Year, as well as normalizing grocery demand due to decrease in consumer hoarding behavior post-COVID-19. During the quarter, Freshippo continued to strengthen its merchandising capabilities and improve its operating efficiency that resulted in positive operating results.

International Commerce

Our International commerce retail businesses include Lazada, AliExpress, Trendyol and Daraz platforms. The combined order volume of these businesses grew 15% year-over-year for the quarter ended March 31, 2023.

During the quarter, AliExpress launched Choice, a new service to global consumers. Choice offers consumers a curation of great value products across an extensive range of categories. Consumers in selected countries enjoy free shipping, free returns and quality delivery guarantees when placing orders on Choice. By leveraging chartered flights and utilizing overseas warehouses, AliExpress has been able to offer these value-added services with shortened delivery time in key strategic countries. As a result, in the March quarter, Choice’s daily orders ramped up rapidly and contributed to double-digit order growth for AliExpress during the quarter.

In Southeast Asia, Lazada recorded double-digit order growth year-over-year during the quarter ended March 31, 2023. Through continuous improvement of user engagement program to most of the markets, Lazada continued to increase its buyer base. Lazada also continued to improve its monetization rate by offering more value-added services that resulted in improving revenue growth.

During the quarter, Trendyol mobilized its resources to provide aid and support for those affected by the major earthquakes that struck Türkiye in February. Year-over-year order growth rate in the quarter remained resilient, driven by the normalization of the Turkish business from March onwards as well as the strong order growth in new businesses.

Local Consumer Services

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, order growth of Local consumer services exceeded 20%. Segment losses continued to narrow driven by improving overall business efficiency.

To-Home

Starting in February, Ele.me's GMV growth and order growth substantially increased due to improving consumer demand, increasing number of active merchants and effective scaling of our delivery capacity. For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, Ele.me's unit economics per order continued to be positive and improved year-over-year due to increased average order value and reduced delivery cost per order.

To-Destination

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, year-over-year order growth of "To-Destination" businesses, which included Amap and Fliggy, increased rapidly due to the strong recovery in commuting and travel demand. In March, the number of average daily active users of Amap reached a new record high of 150 million, driven by increasing intra-city commute and inter-city travel demand. In March, Fliggy’s domestic hotel booking value grew over 70% compared to the same period in 2019 driven by a surge in business and recreational travel demand.

Cainiao

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, revenue from Cainiao, before inter-segment elimination, grew 15% year-over-year to RMB18,915 million (US$2,754 million). In the quarter ended March 31, 2023, 72% of Cainiao’s total revenue was generated from external customers. Revenue from Cainiao, after inter-segment elimination, grew 18% year-over-year to RMB13,619 million (US$1,983 million), primarily driven by increasing revenue per order from international fulfillment solution services as well as increasing demand for consumer logistics services.

Cainiao continues to expand its international logistics network by strengthening its end-to-end logistics capabilities. With the aim of providing merchants with stable and cost-effective services, Cainiao continues to upgrade its overseas warehouse network and offers a wide range of logistics solutions, including cargo collection in China, international line-haul, overseas feeder services, as well as overseas last-mile delivery services. These capabilities have successfully supported our internal and external customers. For AliExpress Choice, Cainiao has upgraded its warehouse network to improve its parcel bundling and direct shipping capabilities, enabling merchants to achieve full-scale global logistics management for worldwide shipping. In March, Cainiao became the first China logistics partner of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) , and through the partnership Cainiao will help WFP shorten delivery time of critical supplies during global emergency situations.

In China, Cainiao continues to expand its Cainiao Post network that offers a variety of value-added services. During the quarter ended March 31, 2023, Cainiao Post further increased its penetration of door-step parcel delivery service to customers, with door-step delivery parcels increasing by approximately 85% year-over-year.

Cloud

Our Cloud segment comprises Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk. For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, total revenue from our Cloud segment before inter-segment elimination, which includes revenue from services provided to other Alibaba businesses, was RMB24,559 million (US$3,576 million), a decline of 3% year-over-year. In the quarter ended March 31, 2023, revenue from our Cloud segment, after inter-segment elimination, was RMB18,582 million (US$2,706 million), a decline of 2% year-over-year. The year-over-year decrease in revenue of our Cloud segment reflected delays in delivery of hybrid cloud projects given the COVID-19 resurgence in January, normalization of CDN demand compared to the same period last year, as well as the impact from a top customer phasing out using our overseas cloud services for its international business due to non-product related reasons.

Our Cloud segment revenue is becoming more diversified with revenue contribution from non-Internet industries steadily increasing. During the quarter, after inter-segment elimination, revenue from non-internet industries grew healthily, driven by financial services, retail, media and automobile industries. For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, after inter-segment elimination, revenue contribution from non-Internet industries to Cloud segment revenue was 55%.

Alibaba Cloud

As a cloud computing product company, Alibaba Cloud has been committed to the research and development of core technologies of cloud computing, big data and AI as well as the promotion of computing power and AI. Through a series of initiatives we launched recently, we aim to further expand our public cloud customer base and increase cloud utilization, and to leverage the historic opportunity in generative AI to drive the growth of high-quality computing power for machine learning and services. We believe these initiatives will drive healthy and sustainable growth of Alibaba Cloud.

• Generative AI: In April, Alibaba Cloud unveiled its latest large language model (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问). We plan to integrate new LLM into all business applications across Alibaba’s ecosystem in the near future to further enhance user experience. To enable enterprise customers to reap the benefits of AI-driven innovation, Alibaba Cloud will offer its clients access to Tongyi Qianwen on cloud and enable them to develop customized LLMs for their business scenarios. Since the announcement of the model, we have received over 200,000 beta testing requests from enterprise users across a broad range of sectors.
• Product Pricing: Recently, Alibaba Cloud has endorsed multiple actions to make computing more accessible and affordable. We announced a new instance family that provides the same level of stability and offers up to 40% cost savings. For existing products, we reduced the prices of some of our core utility products, including computing, storage, networking and security products, by up to 50%. We believe these moves will help our customers increase public cloud adoption in China as well as unlock emerging opportunities to leverage AI technology for enterprises.
• Partnership: At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Partner Conference, Alibaba Cloud unveiled several initiatives to our partners, including the promotion of commission to our ecosystem partners, in order to further integrate our proprietary technology and products into our partners’ solutions to create value for our enterprise customers.

DingTalk

DingTalk, our intelligent collaboration workplace and application development platform, offers new ways of working, sharing and collaboration for modern enterprises and organizations. During the 2023 DingTalk Spring Summit on April 18, 2023, DingTalk unveiled the integration of intelligent capabilities based on Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen LLM into its product. Users can activate multiple AI capabilities by typing the slash symbol (/), including article creation, meeting notes summary, image generation, DingTalk mini-app building and robot training. As a PaaS platform, DingTalk will further help customers and ecosystem partners to unlock the potential of AI capabilities.

Digital Media and Entertainment

For the quarter ended March 31, 2023, Youku’s total subscription revenue grew 13% year-over-year, primarily driven by increasing ARPU as well as benefiting from high-quality original content such as Who Is He (他是谁) and The Blood of Youth (少年歌行). In the March quarter, demand for offline ticketing services normalized, resulting in strong growth in businesses such as Damai and Taopiaopiao.

Updates on ESG Initiatives

Progress in decarbonization

We have been committed to promoting decarbonization across our platform ecosystem. In the past quarter, we cooperated with the China National Institute of Standardization and other professional institutions to release four low-carbon related standards. On April 22 Earth Day, we launched "88 Decarbonization Day" to promote the importance and environmental benefits of low-carbon products to customers.

Supporting the building of socioeconomic resilience

In the past quarter, we helped small and medium enterprises and underdeveloped regions build resilience for better development.

• Taobao and Tmall: Taobao and Tmall helped new merchants improve their operations by offering them various operational assistance, including providing logistics support, business decision support, and development funding.
• 1688.com: 1688.com launched the “Warm Spring Recovery” campaign to help manufacturers attract new customers and provide marketing, financial and logistics support.
• Cainiao: Cainiao opened rural medical emergency warehouses in six key cities across China and continued to increase investment in warehousing and transport capacity in rural areas to improve overall emergency logistics capabilities for rural areas.

Share Repurchases

During the quarter ended March 31, 2023, we repurchased 21.5 million ADSs (the equivalent of 172.4 million ordinary shares) for approximately US$1.9 billion under our share repurchase program. As of March 31, 2023, we had 20.5 billion ordinary shares (the equivalent of approximately 2.6 billion ADSs) outstanding, and approximately US$19.4 billion remaining under the current authorization, effective through March 2025.

THE RESTRUCTURING

On March 28, 2023, we announced a new organizational and governance structure to empower all our businesses to become more agile, enhance decision making, enable faster responses to market changes and promote innovation to capture opportunities, thereby unlocking shareholder value.

Business Group Directors and CEOs

Under our new structure, Alibaba Group is the holding company of the six major business groups and various other businesses. Each of the six major business groups is independently managed by its own chief executive officer and board of directors (or equivalent governing body). The director and CEO candidates of these major business groups are subject to the approval and appointment of Alibaba Group’s board of directors.

The directors and CEOs of the six major business groups approved by Alibaba Group’s board of directors are:

Capital Management Committee

Our board of directors has formed a new capital management committee to undertake a comprehensive capital management plan to enhance shareholder value. This committee will review and decide important matters relating to Alibaba Group’s activities as a holding company, including capital market transactions, shareholder return initiatives, subsidiary equity incentive plans, fundraisings, initial public offerings and spin-offs. The committee is chaired by Mr. Daniel Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and the members are Mr. Joseph C. Tsai, Director and Executive Vice Chairman, Mr. J. Michael Evans, Director and President, and Ms. Maggie Wu, Director and former Chief Financial Officer.

Busi

Contacts

Investor Relations Contact
Rob Lin

Investor Relations

Alibaba Group Holding Limited

[email protected]

Media Contacts:
Cathy Yan

[email protected]

Ivy Ke

[email protected]

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