Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (阿里巴巴) quarterly revenue growth is surging again, a development that should help the Chinese e-commerce company sell its shares in its initial public offering (IPO).
The latest evidence of Alibaba’s financial health surfaced in a regulatory update filed on Wednesday as the company prepares to complete its IPO next month.
Alibaba saw revenue of US$2.54 billion for the quarter ending on June 30, a 46 percent increase from the same period last year based on current exchange rates for the yuan, according to the update.
The performance is likely to ease concerns that arose in June when Alibaba disclosed revenue growth of 39 percent during the quarter ending March 31, the slowest rate in six years.
Alibaba earned nearly US$2 billion last quarter, including a one-time gain of US$1 billion generated by a reassessment of the company’s investment portfolio.
If not for that accounting maneuver and other items unrelated to the company’s ongoing business, Alibaba said it still would have earned nearly US$1.2 billion.
That represented a 60 percent increase in Alibaba’s adjusted earnings from the previous year, the data in the filing showed.
The impressive numbers set the stage for Alibaba’s management to begin meeting after the US Labor Day weekend with money managers interested in investing in the IPO. The roving presentations, known as a “road show,” give investors a chance to gather more information while Alibaba’s bankers gauge the demand for the company’s stock before setting a price for the IPO shares and determining how many are to be offered.
Analysts believe the demand to invest in Alibaba should be so high that the company could surpass the US$16 billion that Facebook Inc raised two years ago. That IPO was the largest ever for a technology company.
Alibaba is expected to debut on the New York Stock Exchange with a market value ranging from US$150 billion to US$200 billion, topping all but a few US companies.
Barring any setbacks, the IPO should be completed toward the end of next month.
Alibaba is thriving because it has built an e-commerce market that has become a magnet for businesses and consumers alike as China’s economy steadily grows. The company’s network of Web sites includes Taobao (淘寶), Tmall (天貓) and AliExpress (速賣通), as well as Alibaba.
The total sales made on Alibaba’s Web sites are US$296 billion annually, according to Wednesday’s update, up from US$248 billion posted annually when the company first filed its IPO documents in May.
Alibaba now has 279 million active buyers, up from 231 million when the IPO process began.
In another promising sign Alibaba attracts 188 million monthly visitors on mobile devices who are spending US$71 billion annually, data in Wednesday’s filing showed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts