Alibaba Group Holding Limited American Depositary Shares, each represents eight Ordinary SharesBABA
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Alibaba Group Holding Limited American Depositary Shares, each represents eight Ordinary Shares 2027 Q1 Earnings Call

Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.

PeriodQ1 2027Duration1 hr 36 minParticipants9

Transcript

Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Alibaba Group's June quarter 2026 results conference call. At this time, all participants are on listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call over to Lydia Liu, Head of Investor Relations of Alibaba Group. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Lydia LiuHead of Investor Relations

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Alibaba Group's June quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining the call today are Joe Tsai, Chairman, Eddie Wu, Chief Executive Officer, Toby Xu, Chief Financial Officer, Jiang Fan, Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba E-commerce Business Group. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements based on management's current expectations that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We also make reference to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures are included in today's earnings press release and investor presentation. Our comments will be on year-over-year comparisons unless we state otherwise. A replay of the call will be available on our website later today. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Eddie.

Speaker

Good evening, good morning, and welcome to Alibaba Group's earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027. Over the past quarter, Alibaba's strategic AI investments have translated into robust results, with a total group revenue growing 9% year over year. AI commercialization has also accelerated across the board. Alibaba Cloud's external revenue grew 45%, and EBITDA increased 133% year over year, continuing to deliver on our commitment to accelerate growth. Revenue from AI-related products has maintained triple-digit growth for the 12th consecutive quarter, with annual revenue run rate surpassing RMB 49.5 billion, around $7.3 billion. It is the core engine of Alibaba Cloud's growth acceleration. I will now walk you through four key areas: AI and cloud commercialization, full-stack AI capabilities, AI application ecosystem, and consumption business. First, AI and cloud commercialization accelerated across the board and is expected to sustain high growth going forward.

Speaker

This quarter, Alibaba Cloud's external revenue growth accelerated to 45%, a 22-quarter high, while adjusted EBITDA margin reached 11.6%. Notably, this 45% growth was broad-based, driven by compute storage Model as a Service, MaaS, and AI applications. We proactively scaled back low-margin business, continuing to improve the quality of our growth. This quarter, annual revenue run rate from AI-related products exceeded RMB 49.5 billion, and its share of Alibaba Cloud's external revenue rose to 35%. AI-related products generate significantly higher gross margins than the average cloud portfolio. Our recurring AI-related product revenue spans multiple layers: AI compute, MaaS, and AI applications. This multilayered mix of AI revenue sources and monetization models means growing customer demand at any layer converts directly into commercial opportunity for us. This structural advantage will underpin sustained rapid growth in recurring AI-related product revenue going forward.

Speaker

The surge in AI agents directly drives demand for tokens and GPU compute, while also significantly boosting demand for our traditional cloud products across CPU compute, storage databases, and networking. Alibaba Cloud is undergoing a comprehensive upgrade to an agentic cloud. Based on the latest data, the ARR of our model and application services, including MaaS, has surpassed 16 billion RMB. Based on current market feedback and our contract pipelines, compute demand will continue to outstrip supply. As we continue to ramp up our supply, our AI and cloud revenue growth will accelerate further in the coming quarters, alongside continued improvement in profitability. Second, our full-stack AI capabilities continue to strengthen, marked by the scaled commercialization of proprietary chips, faster model iteration, and a thriving open-source ecosystem. This quarter, deepening synergy between proprietary T-Head chips and proprietary foundation models further improved our AI commercialization efficiency.

Speaker

T-Head has established a full-stack proprietary silicon portfolio spanning GPU, CPU, and networking chips. As of early August, Zhenwu chips have served more than 650 customers on Alibaba Cloud. The SuperNode instance, powered by T-Head's next-generation Zhenwu M890 AI processor, recently launched on Alibaba Cloud at commercial scale. We expect supply to continue ramping up in the second half of the year to meet strong customer demand. Alibaba Cloud's Zhenwu M890 SuperNode can efficiently run inference workload for foundation models with more than 2 trillion parameters. Both Kibi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Max are already using it to provide MaaS services to external customers. At the data center layer, Alibaba Cloud has cut the delivery time for hyperscale AI data centers to 100 days, a world-leading pace that will significantly speed up our global compute infrastructure buildup.

Speaker

At the model layer, our model release cadence has intensified over the past month with major iterations across our large language, image, audio, video, and music models, all ranking among the world's top tier. Last week, we opened the model weights of Qwen 3.8 Max with 2.4 trillion parameters and the Qwen 3.8 27B model series. To date, the Qwen model series has been downloaded more than 3 billion times globally, with more than 300,000 derivative models built on it. We believe a thriving open source model ecosystem drives greater demand for our cloud computing services, creating a virtual cycle. Third, our AI native applications span both enterprise and consumer use cases, driving rapid growth in token consumption. On the enterprise side, we launched QwenWork, a new AI productivity product built for enterprise workforce scenarios, delivering agentic capabilities at scale.

Speaker

We expect productivity agents to become another engine of ARR growth. On the consumer side, the Qwen app continued to steadily grow its user base and is expanding the range of its value-added offerings. Through close coordination between Alibaba Token Hub and Alibaba Cloud, we're running a highly efficient commercial flywheel across compute models, tokens, applications, and monetization. Fourth, our e-commerce businesses remained solid this quarter. In quick commerce, we continued to narrow losses substantially while growing business scale by 45%, with unit economics improving quarter-over-quarter. Having crossed the AI commercialization inflection point last quarter, we're now seeing growth accelerate and margins expand this quarter. Our AI business' own capacity to self-fund and sustain itself is strengthening, giving us greater confidence to keep investing. Looking ahead, AI has become Alibaba's most certain growth engine.

Speaker

We will stay strategically disciplined and drive long-term growth through our full stack AI capabilities. I will now hand over to Toby to walk you through our financial results.

Toby XuCFO

Thank you. Thank you, Eddie.

Toby XuCFO

Our strategic priorities in AI plus cloud and consumption businesses, backed by disciplined investments, delivered strong results this quarter. Cloud segment revenue growth further accelerated to 45%, with its EBITDA margin sequentially rising to 12%. AI-related product revenue continued to drive this momentum, marking the 12th consecutive quarter of triple-digit growth and accounting for 35% of external cloud revenue. The strong performance demonstrates growing customer adoption of our full stack AI capabilities, spanning AI agents, models, cloud infrastructure, and proprietary chips, as well as our enhanced scale efficiencies and the robust pricing power in a supply-constrained market. On consumption, Taobao Instant Commerce continued to improve its unit economics while maintaining market share. Overall, e-commerce EBITDA remained relatively stable year-over-year. To realize synergies across our commerce platforms and strengthen our full stack AI capabilities, we have implemented strategic realignment of certain businesses in our financial reporting.

Toby XuCFO

Starting from this quarter, our segment reporting will present the following. First, Alibaba E-commerce Group. Second, AI Cloud and Compute Services. Third, AI Labs and Applications. And number four, All others. Now let's look at the financial results for this quarter. Total revenue increased 9% year-over-year to RMB 269 billion, driven by the strong momentum in cloud business and quick commerce. Total adjusted EBITDA decreased 30% to RMB 27.3 billion, primarily attributable to the investment in technology, partly offset by the improved operating results in our cloud business, as well as enhanced operating efficiencies across various businesses. Our GAAP net income was RMB 10.4 billion, a decrease of 75%, primarily due to the decrease in income from operations and decrease in net gains from disposal of investments and mark-to-market changes of our equity investments.

Toby XuCFO

Operating cash flow this quarter increased by 11% to RMB 22.9 billion, compared to RMB 20.7 billion in the same quarter last year. Free cash flow was an outflow of RMB 44.7 billion, compared to an outflow of RMB 18.8 billion in the same quarter last year. The decrease was mainly attributed to the investment in cloud infrastructure. CapEx was RMB 67.7 billion this quarter, reflecting our continued investments in AI infrastructure to meet strong and growing customer demand. The significant year-over-year increase is due to several reasons, including fluctuations in procurement cycles, increasing in CPU compute capacity driven by anticipated growing customer adoption of AI agents in higher pricing of a broad range of chip components. As of June 30, 2026, we held approximately $30.7 billion in net cash. Excluding debt with maturities beyond five years, our net cash position stands at approximately $46.5 billion.

Toby XuCFO

This balance sheet strength gives us confidence to invest for robust growth. Our AI plus cloud investment has a clear path to attractive ROIC. Our servers equipped with chips typically reach break even within 3 years. With a 5-year useful life, we expect them to generate positive free cash flow, at least in the 2 years following breakeven. For the quarter ended June 30, 2026, we repurchased shares of an aggregate consideration of $162 billion. We remain committed to maximizing long-term shareholder returns through disciplining the capital allocation across investments for AI plus cloud business growth, share buybacks, and dividends. We will adjust our priorities as market conditions and the strategic needs evolve. Now let's first look at our e-commerce businesses. The new Alibaba E-commerce Group reflects our strategic focus on unlocking significant synergies across our domestic and cross-border e-commerce businesses.

Toby XuCFO

Starting from this quarter, we will present Alibaba E-commerce Group's revenue as the following. First, China eCommerce. Second, China Quick Commerce. Third, International eCommerce, and fourth, Global Wholesale. Revenue for Alibaba E-commerce Group was RMB 205.9 billion, an increase of 4%. Customer managing revenue decreased by 7%, excluding the contrary revenue impact from the new business development program, customer managing revenue would have grown by 1% year-over-year. Revenue from China Quick Commerce business was RMB 53.3 billion, an increase of 45%, driven by Freshippo and Taobao Instant Commerce. Alibaba E-commerce Group's adjusted EBITDA remained relatively stable year-over-year at RMB 39.7 billion, underscoring our cost discipline against the backdrop of increased investments in user experiences and technology. Taobao Instant Commerce continued to improve its unit economics quarter-over-quarter while maintaining market share, driven by higher average order value and enhanced fulfillment logistics efficiency.

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