On 15 May, two days into the pre-sale of the 618 Shopping Festival this year, the e-commerce giant Alibaba released its annual financial report for FY2025 with the year ending on 31 March. At the same time, Alibaba also announced its plans to distribute 4.6 billion USD of dividends to its stockholders.
The annual report shows that in Q4 FY2025, Alibaba earned 236.45 billion RMB (32.81 billion USD), growing 7% year-on-year (YoY). Adjusted EBITA was 32.62 billion RMB (4.53 billion USD) , increasing by 36% YoY. For the full year FY2025, Alibaba earned 996.35 billion RMB (138.25 billion USD), up 6% YoY. Adjusted EBITA was 173.07 billion RMB (24.01 billion USD), a YoY increase of 23%.
Alibaba’s CEO Eddie Wu (吴泳明) states that the group’s strategy for both Q4 and full-year FY2025 was to focus on users and be driven by AI. Following high demand for AI services, Alibaba Cloud saw its quarterly revenue growth rate increase to 18%. Taobao and Tmall group saw its revenue grow 9% to 101.37 billion RMB (14.07 billion USD) in Q4 and was up 3% to 449.83 billion RMB (62.42 billion USD) for the full-year FY2025.
However, the results caused Alibaba’s share prices to drop over 8% in the US the next day. The main reason is that its capital expenditures, an indicator of its investment in AI, were down 22.6% in Q4, compared to Q3, lagging behind the “380 billion RMB in 3 years” promise. As Alibaba Cloud’s growth falls short of expectations, investors are becoming impatient. Yet with Alibaba “all in” with AI and the recent announcement to go back to “entrepreneurship” and “build another Alibaba with AI”, the company is far from complacent. But whether AI will work out for them needs continued monitoring, especially in terms of commercialisation. So far, its Qwen3 family of models seems technically advanced.
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