Alibaba’s Mobile Revenue Jumps 149 Percent

One year ago, when Alibaba announced its fiscal year 2015 results for its March quarter, it also named its new CEO, showing the direction the mobile-focused company would be headed.

And during its quarterly earnings report yesterday (May 5), Alibaba showed just how dominating its mobile commerce side really is and how it’s increasingly paying off for the company. Mobile, of course, was a major highlight of the company’s earnings report, but that wasn’t the only place Alibaba’s numbers popped this time around.

“Alibaba Group finished the fiscal year on a very strong note. In March, we surpassed RMB 3 trillion [$461.5 billion] in annual GMV, and our revenue for the year was over RMB 100 billion [$15.4 billion]. We achieved strong growth in mobile users, active buyers and transactions,” said Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group. “Our focus on long-term strategic priorities — globalization, rural expansion, building a world-class cloud computing business and creating a comprehensive media and entertainment platform — has laid a strong foundation for future growth.”

As for major numbers, here’s how some of the key figures broke down:

• Alibaba’s quarterly revenue: $3.75 billion, a 39 percent YOY increase.
• Alibaba’s active mobile users: 410 million, an increase of 17 million users from the Dec. 2015 quarter. Annual active buyers on its China retail marketplaces increased to 423 million, a jump of 16 million from the prior quarter.
• Total GMV transacted on Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces: $115 billion, a 24 percent YOY increase. And, of that GMV, 73 percent was conducted on mobile (roughly $84 billion).
• Total payment volume transacted through Alipay in the quarter on Koubei, Alibaba’s local services joint venture with Ant Financial: $3 billion.

But the mobile revenue figure stuck out the most. Mobile revenue hit $2.03 billion, which was an increase of 149 percent YOY.

“Our excellent results this quarter reflect the unique strength of our core eCommerce business, despite challenging economic conditions, as well as the emerging momentum of our balanced portfolio of businesses from mobile media to cloud computing. As a result, we achieved accelerating year-over-year revenue growth of 39 percent, which was the highest revenue growth rate for the past four quarters,” said Maggie Wu, CFO of Alibaba Group.

“With several consecutive quarters of increases in revenue per active buyer and revenue per mobile MAU, we showcase the resiliency and growing clout of Chinese consumers. This bodes well for our business as our annual active buyers on our China retail marketplaces increased to 423 million,” she said.