Alibaba Q3 2025 Earning Report
Performance Key Highlights
✅ Profit per share: ¥21.39 (Expected: ¥19.12) – Up 13% from last year
✅ Total revenue: ¥280.15B (Expected: ¥277.37B) – Up 8% from last year
✅ Operating profit: ¥41.21B – Up 83% from last year
✅ Net income: ¥46.43B – Up a massive 333% from last year
✅ Cash flow from operations: ¥70.92B – Up 10% from last year
❌ Free cash flow: ¥39.02B – Down 31% from last year
Key Business Segment Performance
💡 Cloud Computing (Cloud Intelligence Group):
✅ Revenue: ¥31.74B (Expected: ¥30.68B) – Up 13%
✅ Profit: ¥3.14B – Up 33%
🛍️ Online Shopping (Taobao & Tmall Group):
✅ Total revenue: ¥136.09B – Up 5%
✅ Ad revenue from sellers: ¥100.79B – Up 9%
❌ Direct sales revenue: ¥28.73B – Down 9%
✅ Profit: ¥61.08B – Up 2%
🌍 International E-commerce (Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group):
✅ Total revenue: ¥37.76B – Up 32%
✅ Retail revenue (AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol): ¥31.55B – Up 36%
✅ Wholesale revenue: ¥6.20B – Up 18%
❌ Loss: ¥4.95B – Bigger loss than last year (-57%)
My Analysis
TaoBao and Tmall Group's customer management revenue grew by 9%. The rise in GMV was basically the tone set in Q3, because the conference call said that the Double 11 GMV was strong. CMR growth accelerated, and commission income benefited from the adjustment of the monetization strategy itself. In short, other "emerging e-commerce" companies have reached the time of diminishing marginal growth, and the rest is nothing more than comparing the granularity of operations. But for e-commerce, the market share is stable.
"AI+Cloud" has become a new engine, Alibaba Cloud has returned to double-digit growth, and AI revenue has grown by triple digits for six consecutive quarters. The Qianwen model can be compared with DeepSeek. This evaluation is of course a matter of opinion, but the running score is not low. Qwen2.5-VL-72B can outperform GPT-4o on the VISCO benchmark, which is the first open source large model that can beat 4o.
2025 should be a year of investment for Alibaba, whether it is Taobao Tmall (2025 is the first year of its three-year investment cycle) or the AI (or especially the capex in this regard, please pay close attention). Obviously, Alibaba's investment focus lies in growth rather than bottom line - in GMV, CMR, and cloud computing growth rather than profit. I estimate that the monetization level will not drop significantly, but expectations will not rise significantly either.