Alibaba’s Slowing Sales Spook Investors On Edge Over Ant

(Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s revenue grew at its slowest pace on record for a September quarter, underscoring how the e-commerce giant’s post-pandemic rebound is starting to plateau.

Asia’s largest corporation reported a 30% rise in sales in the September quarter, in line with expectations but down a tad from the previous three months. That did little to reassure investors worried about the tightening regulatory scrutiny that forced Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co. to call off its $35 billion IPO. Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang would only say it’s evaluating the impact on its business from more stringent rules governing its 32%-owned sister company.

Alibaba’s shares sank as much as 4.3% in early Hong Kong trading, extending a volatile streak that began with a selloff of more than $60 billion earlier this week. The company enjoys a close relationship with Ant, whose Alipay mobile wallet anchors the majority of Alibaba’s e-commerce transactions and whose microlending services drive consumption. In response to a question about the extent to which Ant loans lead to online shopping, executives said the company doesn’t quantify that traffic.

“As Ant Group’s major shareholder, Alibaba is actively evaluating the impact on our business in response to the recently proposed changes in the fintech regulatory environment, and will take appropriate measures accordingly,” Zhang told analysts on a conference call.

Read more: Inside the Chaotic Unraveling of Jack Ma’s $35 Billion IPO

Alibaba booked almost 4.7 billion yuan of profit from Ant in the September quarter, a big chunk of its overall bottom line. The e-commerce giant reported revenue for the three months ended September of 155.1 billion yuan ($23.4 billion), meeting the 154.8 billion yuan average of estimates. Profit fell 60% to 28.8 billion yuan from a year earlier, when it booked a one-time gain from the acquisition of its stake in Ant.

Alibaba had benefited from stronger sales in its home market, which had led the global recovery from Covid-19. Gross domestic product grew 4.9% last quarter, making China the world’s only major growth engine. The e-commerce titan is banking on more than a quarter of a million brands, increased discounting and technologies like livestreamed selling to draw consumers to its annual blockbuster Single’s Day shopping festival, which culminates next week.

“The performance of Singles Day might be a more important benchmark to look at, rather than the third quarter result,” said Steven Zhu, an analyst with Pacific Epoch. “E-commerce is the only sector that will actually benefit from coronavirus, simply due to the fact that a lot of normal consumption is shifted from offline to online.”

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Read more: Magic Johnson Selling Gels Shows Why Alibaba Escaped Trump

Alibaba’s shares have gained more than 60% from their Covid-19-era lows in March and touched a record high in October when Ant priced its IPO. Retail and institutional investors had flocked to the record $35 billion-plus IPO, betting that Ant will overcome high valuations, regulatory headwinds and rising competition to reshape the future of global finance.

Excluding the Covid-hit March quarter, the 29% increase in Alibaba’s core commerce business was the slowest in more than five years as consumers put off purchases ahead of Single’s Day. The closely watched customer management revenue for China commerce rose 20% in the quarter. Core commerce should expand at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2021 to 2023, CGS-CIMB analysts including Lei Yang wrote.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says

Alibaba may continue to benefit from accelerated user and merchant adoption of online grocery shopping, cloud computing and remote-work applications, driven by China’s Covid-19 outbreak. Its domestic retail marketplaces have fully recovered from the pandemic. Longer-term sales and profit growth could be driven by global expansion and the monetization of newer business segments such as logistics, media and entertainment.

-- Vey-Sern Ling and Tiffany Tam, analysts

Click here for the research.

Revenue for Alibaba’s cloud division jumped 60% in the quarter, driven by demand from customers in the internet, finance and retail industries. The unit is forecast to turn profitable for the first time ever in the year ending March, a target that was reiterated by Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu on Thursday. That will be a milestone for the decade-old business, which competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp. and Google globally and is fending off upstarts like Tencent Holdings Ltd. at home.

Alibaba is keeping up a steady pace of acquisitions to drive growth. The company teamed up with Richemont to jointly invest $1.1 billion in luxury e-commerce retailer Farfetch Ltd. to tap on the burgeoning demand for highend foreign goods among China’s middle class, according to a statement Thursday. President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday the country may import more than $22 trillion worth of products over the next decade.

In October, Alibaba also agreed to take a stake in Swiss duty-free giant Dufry AG, a move that Zhang said would be a “very important step” in helping the company grow its retail travel business as China develops domestic free trade ports. And to capitalize on the boom in online groceries, it last month paid about $3.6 billion to double its stake in Sun Art Retail Group Ltd., taking control of one of China’s largest hypermarts to try and fend off rivals like JD.com Inc., upstart Pinduoduo Inc. and Tencent-backed Meituan.

Read more: Magic Johnson Selling Gels Shows U.S. Brands Flocking to Alibaba

(Updates with investments in 12th paragraph)

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