Alibaba ready for possible trade war with US: Vice chairman Joseph Tsai

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Thursday said that the company is ready for a possible trade war with the United States, adding that it would not only survive the fight but will also thrive. This comes after the company reported its total earnings for the year.

"If US goods become too expensive due to tariffs, Chinese consumers can shift to domestic producers or imports from other parts of the world," CNN Money quoted Alibaba (BABA) Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai, as saying to analysts during an earnings conference call.

However, Tsai clarified that Alibaba does not want a trade war, as this would further deteriorate trade talks. He also said that the e-commerce giant would not face any difficulty in finding other markets for its products if the US becomes a tougher place for business.

"In terms of our international expansion, the world is a big place. We have made substantial progress in emerging markets like Southeast Asia and South Asia as these markets are ripe for us to add more consumers into our ecosystem," he said.

Jack Ma's Alibaba acquires Pakistan e-commerce retail firm Daraz

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Wednesday said that it had purchased leading Pakistani online retailer Daraz, continuing its overseas expansion by gaining a foothold in the growing South Asian consumer market.

The move came after Alibaba announced in March a doubling of its investment in Southeast Asian e-commerce firm Lazada.

China is seeking closer economic ties with Asian neighbours including Pakistan through its Belt and Road initiative, a strategy to increase trade links that is led primarily by infrastructure projects.

Daraz, founded in 2012, was purchased from Rocket Internet, a Berlin-based incubator of online startups.

Its key markets are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal, claiming 30,000 sellers and 500 brands on its platform, according to a statement by Alibaba.

Jack Ma's Too-Big-to-Fail Financial Giant Faces a Clampdown

There’s no other company on Earth quite like Ant Financial.

Spanning online payments, insurance, lending, credit scores, asset management and more, Jack Ma’s Chinese behemoth resembles a mashup of PayPal, Geico, Wells Fargo and Equifax -- with a bit of BlackRock thrown in for good measure. Thanks to clever mobile apps and a burgeoning Chinese middle class, Ant oversees the world’s biggest money-market fund and handles more than $2.4 trillion of mobile payments every three months. Many of the company’s 870 million customers rely on it for nearly every aspect of their financial lives.

But Ant’s extraordinary reach may soon expose the company to a major challenge: Chinese policy makers, worried that Ant and other financial holding companies pose systemic risks to the nation’s $12.7 trillion economy, are drafting new regulations that could make it much harder for the companies to grow.

The rules will force Ant and some of its peers that straddle at least two financial industries to obtain licenses from China’s central bank and meet minimum capital requirements for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The companies’ ownership structures and inter-group transactions will also be restricted, the people said, adding that the rules need approval from China’s State Council and are subject to change.

Jack Ma urges Zuckerberg to 'fix' Facebook and to 'take it seriously'

Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, urged Mark Zuckerberg to tackle the growing criticism aimed at Facebook Inc. by regulators and users around the world, and “really take it seriously.”

China’s richest man and chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. on Monday weighed in on the controversy, calling on his fellow internet pioneer to “fix” a social network that had grown explosively over the past decade and a half. Asked at the Boao Forum about the Facebook furor, the billionaire started dismissing questions but then couldn’t help opining on the crisis facing the U.S. company.

Facebook’s shares have tumbled since the company disclosed in March that it may have shared the personal data of tens of millions of users with Cambridge Analytica, a research firm that helped elect President Donald Trump. Enraged users launched a #deletefacebook campaign and regulators around the world are investigating its handling of sensitive personal information.

“It is the time to fix it. It is the time for the CEO to really take it seriously. I think the problems will be solved,” Ma told delegates to the annual conference on the sunny island of Hainan.

Alibaba shares tank after margins decline, market value dips $30 billion

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd shares fell the most in 18 months and cut its market valuation by about $30 billion after investments in brick-and-mortar assets and digital media squeezed profit margins in the December quarter.
The Chinese e-commerce giant reported revenue that topped analyst estimates and raised its growth forecast for the 12 months ending in March to 55 to 56 percent. But operating margin shrank to 31 percent in the last quarter from 39 percent a year earlier.

Shares fell 5.9 percent in New York trading, the sharpest decline since June 2016.
Alibaba will also buy 33 percent of Ant Financial, helping to clear the way for an initial public offering of the Chinese payments giant. While no cash is changing hands, Ant Financial will end royalty payments to Alibaba that were worth more than $300 million last fiscal year.

US blocks MoneyGram sale to China's Ant Financial, cites security concerns

A US government panel rejected Ant Financial's acquisition of US money transfer company MoneyGram International Inc over national security concerns, the companies said on Tuesday, the most high-profile Chinese deal to be torpedoed under the administration of US President Donald Trump.

The $1.2 billion deal's collapse represents a blow for Jack Ma, the executive chairman of Chinese internet conglomerate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, who owns Ant Financial together with Alibaba executives. He was looking to expand Ant Financial's footprint amid fierce domestic competition from Chinese rival Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat payment platform.

Ma, a Chinese citizen who appears frequently with leaders from the highest echelons of the Communist Party, had promised Trump in a meeting a year ago that he would create 1 million US jobs.

MoneyGram shares were down 8.5 percent at $12.06 in after-market trading.

The companies decided to terminate their deal after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rejected their proposals to mitigate concerns over the safety of data that can be used to identify US citizens, according to sources familiar with the confidential discussions.

"Despite our best efforts to work cooperatively with the US government, it has now become clear that CFIUS will not approve this merger," MoneyGram Chief Executive Alex Holmes said in a statement.
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Alibaba says profit up 132% in 'outstanding' quarter amid soaring sales

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said on Thursday that soaring sales fuelled a 132 per cent increase in net profit in what it called an "outstanding" quarter, as the firm raised its expectations for full-year revenue growth.

China's biggest e-commerce company said net profit for the three months ending September 30 reached 17.67 billion yuan, (USD 2.67 billion), up from 7.62 billion yuan in the same period of 2016.

"We had an outstanding quarter," Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu said in a statement.

"This quarter we delivered excellent results, with overall revenue growth of 61 per cent demonstrating the robust momentum in our core commerce business and across the Alibaba economy."

Alibaba said revenue growth in the quarter was fuelled in large part by technological innovations including the app for its key Taobao online shopping, which it said has a growing capability to anticipate and suggest shopping options to its hundreds of millions of users.

Revenues in the quarter, the second in Alibaba's fiscal year, came it at 55.1 billion yuan, topping an analyst estimate of 52 billion yuan compiled by Bloomberg News.
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Amazon vs Alibaba: The R&D spending war

Alibaba this week announced a big push to do more research and development, ploughing $15 billion into new innovation over the next three years. Here’s how that stacks up to what Amazon is already doing:

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Alibaba's revenue to jump 45-48% this year: Jack Ma

China's Alibaba expects its revenue to expand by 45 to 48 percent in its fiscal year from April as more small businesses join its online community in search of sales, Executive Chairman Jack Ma said on Thursday.

Alibaba had revenue of $22.99 billion in its year to the end of March.

"Our revenue this year, we will still have 45-48 percent growth, the money comes from solving problems for others," Ma told hundreds of senior executives who filled a large ballroom in a five-star hotel to listen to him on his first visit to Africa.

Ma, who founded the Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm, said he would consider investing in Kenya after meeting young entrepreneurs and being impressed by the East African nation's broadband infrastructure.

"I was surprised by the speed of the Internet," he told the executives. He told a separate gathering at the University of Nairobi that the speed was faster than in some developed nations.

He said he would consider the investment opportunities he had seen in the country, and make a firm announcement at a later date, adding that the dozens of Chinese entrepreneurs who accompanied him had also been stirred by locals' drive to build businesses.

"They say it is very difficult to find another Jack Ma in China but today we found a lot of Jack Mas in Africa," he said.
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