Photo credit: Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group on Thursday reported earnings for the quarter ending March 31. Shortly afterward, Alibaba Group’s CEO and Director Eddie Wu addressed investors and analysts on an earnings call.
We delivered strong performance this quarter, with total revenue – excluding Sun Art and Intime – growing 10% year-over-year and adjusted EBITA increasing 36% year-over-year. For fiscal year 2025, our “user-first, AI-driven” strategy continued to deliver meaningful results, with continued accelerated growth across our core businesses. We have established a well-defined growth portfolio centered on AI plus cloud, e-commerce, and other internet platform businesses. We are seizing the historic opportunity presented by AI and stepping up our investments in AI infrastructure and advance technologies to further strengthen Alibaba’s global leadership in technology. These capabilities will are also be translated into sustained drivers of business growth.
We continue to see growing demand for cloud and AI – an opportunity that will define the next 10 to 20 years and will not be derailed by short-term supply chain fluctuations.
Driven by robust and growing AI demand, Alibaba Cloud’s revenue growth accelerated to 18% this quarter, with revenue excluding Alibaba-consolidated subsidiaries increasing 17% year-over-year. Public cloud revenue growth continued to accelerate. Revenue from AI-related products has maintained triple-digit year-over-year growth for the seventh consecutive quarter. For the full fiscal year, Alibaba Cloud’s revenue grew by double digits. Looking ahead, we expect AI to remain a key driver of accelerated revenue growth for Alibaba Cloud.
While uncertainties persist in the global AI supply chain, growth of customer demand is unwavering. We continue to see growing demand for cloud and AI – an opportunity that will define the next 10 to 20 years and will not be derailed by short-term supply chain fluctuations. Our confidence and commitment to investing in cloud and AI infrastructure remains unchanged, and we are actively exploring diversified solutions to meet rising customer demand.
We continued to advance foundational research and innovation in large models, pushing the boundaries of model capabilities while remaining firmly committed to open source. In April, we released our next-generation Qwen 3 model as open source and it ranks among the top performers globally on multiple authoritative benchmarks. By the end of April, we had open-sourced over 200 models under the Qwen family, with more than 300 million downloads worldwide and over 100,000 derivative models—making it the world’s largest open-source model family.
As we accelerate the adoption of AI+Cloud across a wide range of industries, two clear trends have emerged. Among large and mid-sized enterprises, AI applications are expanding from internal systems to more customer-facing use cases. At the same time, adoption of AI products is rapidly extending from large enterprises to a growing number of small and medium-sized businesses. This quarter, the industry penetration of our AI products expanded rapidly. In addition to faster adoption among sectors like internet services, autonomous driving, financial services and online education, we are also seeing strong momentum in more traditional industries such as animal farming and manufacturing. These industries are also actively exploring AI applications and we have observed significant growth in demand. In the financial sector, we continue to deepen our industry leadership. Recently, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) officially selected Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB as its enterprise-wide transactional distributed database. This represents a strong endorsement of our technological capabilities by one of the most demanding financial institutions in terms of business performance and technology requirements.
We will continue to focus on driving growth in our core businesses of e-commerce and AI+cloud while shaping a second growth curve powered by technology over the medium to long term.
In e-commerce, we remain focused on putting users first. We continued to invest in user growth and improving user experience. Taobao and Tmall Group saw stronger momentum in new consumer growth and 88VIP members surpassed 50 million. This quarter, TTG customer management revenue rose 12% year-over-year, while adjusted EBITA increased by 8%. We continued to invest in improving the operating environment for merchants, increasing our support for those offering high-quality products and services.
Fueled by strong momentum in its cross-border businesses, AIDC achieved year-over-year revenue growth of 22% this quarter. Operational and investment efficiency also continued to improve. Despite potential uncertainties in global trade regulations, we remain confident that AIDC’s diversified footprint across global markets positions us well to manage changes effectively. We remain on track to achieve overall quarterly profitability in our international e-commerce business in the coming fiscal year.
Other businesses within the Group continued to maintain healthy operations. The Digital Media and Entertainment Group achieved profitability on an adjusted EBITA basis this quarter.
In fiscal year 2026, we will continue to focus on driving growth in our core businesses of e-commerce and AI+cloud while shaping a second growth curve powered by technology over the medium to long term.
