Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba saw revenues leap 59 percent annually for the quarter ended in June, it said yesterday, its strongest growth since it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.

Revenue for the company, seen as a proxy for China’s increasingly crucial consumer sector, reached 32.15 billion yuan (US$4.83 billion) in the June quarter, it said in a statement.

The total was well ahead of the 30.2 billion-yuan average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg News.

Alibaba is China’s dominant player in online commerce, with its Taobao platform estimated to hold more than 90 percent of the consumer-to-consumer market, and its Tmall platform is believed to have over half of business-to-consumer transactions.

But according to the company net income plunged 77 percent year on year to US$1.08 billion in the latest quarter — the first of its financial year.

Still, Alibaba’s chief financial officer Maggie Wu described the results as “excellent.”

“The 59 percent revenue growth for the company overall and the 49 percent revenue growth of our China retail marketplaces represent the highest growth rates we’ve achieved since our IPO,” she said in the statement.

The company’s gross merchandise volume — a measure of value for online sales — rose 24 percent year on year to US$126 billion in the June quarter, the statement said, matching the growth of the previous three months.

The company, often compared to eBay or Amazon of the United States, has expanded outside its core e-commerce business, in sectors ranging from sports to entertainment.

“Our results show the scale and leverage of our ecosystem, as we strengthen our competitive positions in core commerce, cloud computing and digital media and entertainment,” Alibaba chief executive officer Daniel Zhang said in the statement.

In the June quarter, paying customers for Alibaba Cloud, its cloud computing unit, grew to 577,000, with revenue booming by 156 percent annually.

“The focus of its strategy is no longer (online) retail. It has moved to underlying services such as finance, cloud services and logistics,” Li Chengdong, a Beijing-based independent e-commerce strategy analyst, said.

(Source: AFP)