Alibaba Posts Mixed Q3 Results and Postpones Hong Kong Listing Conversion

BEIJING, November 17 (TMTPOST)— Alibaba Group didn’t meet the Wall Street’s expectation of sales recovery as the Covid-19 outbreaks in China, however the quarterly earnings of the Chinese e-commerce giant saw stronger growth excluding decreases in stock portfolio value.

Source: Visual China

In the quarter ended September 30, Alibaba revenue increased 3% year-over-year (YoY) to RMB207.18 billion (US$29.12 billion), missing the analysts’ estimates of RMB208.85 billion. It swung to a RMB22.47 billion net loss that quarter, compared with net income of RMB3.38 billion a year earlier. The loss was primarily attributed to decline in market prices of its investments in publicly-traded companies, and decrease in share of results of equity method investees. Therefore, the company posted non-GAAP net income of RMB33.82 billion with a 19% YoY increase, excluding net gains or losses arising from the changes in fair value of its investments. Adjusted non-GAAP diluted earnings per American depositary share (ADS) accordingly grew 15% YoY to RMB12.92, topping the analysts forecast of RMB11.21.

China commerce, Aliababa’s core business segment, generated RMB 135.43 billion, down 1% YoY. Among them, revenue of the customer management, which tracks how much money merchants provide Alibaba for placements and promotions, fell 7%, while that of direct sales and other gained 6%, mainly driven by robust growth of growth of Freshippo, a grocery chain whose percentage of revenue from online orders remained high at over 65%.

Alibaba admitted the revenue was weighed by the Covid resurgence in China, and also blamed for slowing cross border commerce due to increasing logistics costs and strengthening U.S. dollar. It noted online physical goods GMV generated on two major e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall declined low-single-digit YoY excluding unpaid orders, citing soft consumption demand, the spike in Covid cases and related restrictions as well as ongoing competition.

Alibaba also announced to postpone its change of listing status as scheduled on Thursday, the same day it released financial results. We will not complete conversion to the primary conversion by the end of 2022 as planned, considering we still need to formulate and submit a new employee stock ownership program to shareholders in accordance with the new rules of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), according to a filing with the exchange.

Alibaba announced on July 26 to seek the dual primary listing in Hong Kong, an attempt for allowing its shares continue to be traded even if it fails to avoid of being delisted from the U.S. stock market. Once the conversion completes, the company will become a dual primary listed on HKEX and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the stock marker “S” will be removed from its stock short name on HKEX.