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Alibaba’s share price was near record lows, growth was stalling amid intensifying competition, management changes were coming thick and fast, and Beijing was still closely scrutinizing the company. Ma himself was barely in the public view.
But his message may have instilled some new hope in Alibaba — the e-commerce giant is now seeing growth in its core business and has become one of the leading artificial intelligence players in China and globally, competing with the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek. And Alibaba is now back in favor with the Chinese government.
Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares have quietly risen nearly 60% this year, adding more than $100 billion to the company’s valuation.
“China tech has awoken being led by Alibaba and investors globally are viewing this as the best way to way China tech … and we agree. Alibaba is in pole position to benefit from AI and cloud spend,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC.
CNBC spoke to Alibaba’s chairman as well as a former executive and analysts, who painted a picture of the changes at the tech firm that have led to the start of the company’s comeback.
Alibaba’s fall
The comments weren’t widely picked up on. Days later, Alibaba’s share price hit a record high with its market capitalization exceeding $858 billion.
Alibaba was riding wave of successes that had seen it grow into the biggest e-commerce player in China, with international expansion on the agenda and its cloud business growing quickly. To top it all off, Alibaba affiliate Ant Group was gearing up for an initial public offering that would raise north of $34 billion, making it the biggest listing in history.
Ant Group, which was also founded by Ma, is a financial technology company that is behind Alipay, one of China’s two most prominent mobile payment systems.
Just two days before Ant Group was scheduled to list in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the IPO was canceled. At the time, Ant cited changes in China’s “regulatory environment.”
Ant Group founder Jack Ma.
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What followed was several years of intense scrutiny on Ma’s empire and China’s biggest technology companies. Regulators clamped down on practices from giants that they viewed as anticompetitive, dished out billions of dollars of fines on companies including Alibaba, forced changes to Ant Group’s structure and brought in a plethora of rules touching many areas of technology.
‘Uncertainty and confusion’
Regulatory scrutiny was one of Alibaba’s headaches in 2021. But it was also facing a number of other issues, including uncertainty around the strength of the Chinese economy that was trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and rising competition.
In particular, newer companies like Pinduoduo and even Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, were capturing attention in China in e-commerce.
In March 2023, Alibaba — a sprawling company that does everything from food delivery to cloud computing and movies — decided to split into six separate business groups, each with the ability to raise outside funding and go public. Alibaba thought the move would make these units more agile.
Then came a leadership reshuffle. Alibaba announced in June 2023 that Daniel Zhang, who had been CEO since 2015 and chairman from 2019, would step down from both roles to focus on the cloud business. But just three months later, Zhang suddenly quit the cloud unit.
Eddie Wu, a co-founder of Alibaba, took over as CEO and the head of cloud. Joe Tsai, another co-founder, stepped up to take on the role of chairman.
That was one of the most tumultuous times in Alibaba’s history.
“During that time period a great sense of uncertainty and confusion hovered over employees. While there was a wait-and-see sort of mentality that set in, the problem was that as time passed, many didn’t know just how long that would be,” Brian Wong, a former Alibaba executive and author of “The Tao of Alibaba,” told CNBC.
“While China’s economy during the start of Covid initially remained robust, following the lock-downs everything turned and the combination of disrupted supply chains and changes in the economic climate only compounded the concerns of where all of this was headed.”
Joe and Eddie steady the ship
Wu sought to return Alibaba’s focus to its core e-commerce and cloud businesses and trim down some of the other initiatives the company had plunged into, moving away from the idea of Alibaba as several separate divisions.
Artificial intelligence moved front and center, with Wu and Tsai suggesting the company needed to adopt a startup mentality to keep up with the competition.
“Large companies move very slow and it’s because the decision-making structure is too complicated … So we really needed to get back to nimbleness and act fast,” Tsai said at the CNBC CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore earlier this month, adding that quick decision-making is key to competing with startup rivals.
Tsai said that he and Wu decided the first thing they needed to do was to “streamline the company.”
“Instead of talking about Alibaba as six different business units, we talked about ourselves as having two core businesses — e-commerce and cloud computing,” Tsai said.
“That simplified everything and our communication. It’s very important that we communicate that to our employees. They need to have a simple structure in their minds in order to move faster.”
Younger people in management were also given the power to make decisions, Tsai said.
“It means that actually letting them make some decisions and letting them make mistakes and train them so that they can recover from mistakes,” Tsai added.
Wu and Tsai also scrapped plans to list Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, marking a U-turn on previous commitments.
“Eddie is winning plaudits internally for having trimmed the old and built the new. Jack [Ma] and Joe [Tsai] ultimately made the decision to bet on him and it’s paying off,” Duncan Clark, an early advisor to Alibaba and chairman of BDA, told CNBC by email.
Changing political winds
After the Ant Group IPO was scrapped in late 2020, Ma went out of public view. The billionaire was seen as the poster child of Beijing’s move to rein in the power of private companies and entrepreneurs.
The tightening of regulation and government scrutiny also hit investment. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Chinese tech companies while venture capital investment in startups plunged.
In a country where government policy and support is key for sectors and companies, Beijing’s apparent antagonism toward private business had dampened spirits in the tech sector. But as China continues to face economic headwinds, the role of the technology sector in boosting the economy is back in focus.
And in February this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a rare meeting with entrepreneurs urging them to “show their talents,” in comments seen as giving support to private businesses.
Alibaba’s Ma, among other top Chinese CEOs and founders, were present at that gathering. Ma’s attendance was particularly interesting, given that his empire was under the microscope over the last few years and he had not been seen with China’s political elite for some time.
“Xi’s meeting with Jack Ma also sent out a very clear signal on where the Chinese government’s priorities are at the moment – AI development and the growth of private enterprises are clearly important to China’s economic growth, and we also believe that Alibaba has the support of the Chinese authorities,” Chelsey Tam, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC by email.
The meeting has helped Alibaba’s share price this year. And it appears to have also instilled new confidence in Alibaba to hire and invest.
“It gave us the confidence … to put our earnings back into capex [capital expenditure] and investments and also hire people,” Alibaba’s Tsai said, referencing a more than $50 billion investment in AI infrastructure over the next three years that the company announced in February.
AI success
A large part of Alibaba’s stock rally this year has been driven by the euphoria around DeepSeek and investors looking at tech giants in China to see what they’re doing with AI technology.
Alibaba is among China’s leaders, and in 2023, not long after ChatGPT made a splash, the company launched its first AI model called Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen. The Hangzhou-headquartered company has since aggressively launched numerous models that allow tasks such as video, text and image generation from user prompts.
Alibaba has made its models open source, meaning anyone can download them and build upon them. This has been key to its success. Some of the most popular models on Hugging Face, a global repository of AI models, are built on Qwen.
“Alibaba has been consistently releasing high-impact open source models on Hugging Face since early 2023,” Tiezhen Wang, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, told CNBC.
Wang said Alibaba’s models, which cover features like video, image and text generation, “deliver strong performance across tasks.”
While Alibaba was early in the AI model game, it was the release of a research paper from Chinese firm DeepSeek this year that forced all eyes to focus on what was going on in China. DeepSeek claimed its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips, leading to a global stock sell-off.
“DeepSeek was a wake up call that China tech is not just sitting idle on AI and this indirectly benefits Alibaba as the appetite for AI is clear in China,” Wedbush Securities’ Ives said.
AI competition ramps up
Alibaba’s first models actually predate DeepSeek. But competition in China is ramping up. Some of the country’s biggest tech firms from Baidu to Tencent continue to release models.
But there are questions about how Alibaba will make money off open-source AI models that are free. The answer, according to investors, AI experts and the company executives, is Alibaba’s cloud computing business.
Open source allows a company to build a community of developers around a particular model, strengthening its capabilities and also its reach globally.
More availability of AI and growing demand also means Alibaba could ultimately drive growth in its cloud computing business. Alibaba effectively charges companies to use its servers and computing power which is required to run AI applications, even if it’s not Alibaba’s models.
“We run a cloud computing business which will actually benefit from the proliferation of AI, because every time someone trains a model or runs inference … they have they need cloud computing infrastructure, and we sell compute,” Tsai said.
Alibaba’s cloud computing business posted accelerated growth in the December quarter from the quarter before.
“The key I think now is that rather than viewing Alibaba as a losing market share [and] margin e-commerce company it can now be seen as a large cloud [and] AI company benefiting from all the new opportunities,” BDA’s Clark said.
“It’s a complete change in narrative.”
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