… as is massive anti-trust fine imposed by Chinese regulator for monopolistic practices
CEO Daniel Zhang eats humble pie...
… but stresses intent to double-down on cloud investments
China's Alibaba group has just announced its first quarterly loss since it became a listed company in 2014. In a conference call to investors following the disclosure, Daniel Zhang, the Chairman and CEO explained why. It's down to two factors; the fallout from Jack Ma getting on the wrong side of the Politburo and a major cloud customer taking its business elsewhere. The global pandemic barely gets a mention.
Mr, Zhang said, "The slower revenue growth during the quarter was primarily due to revenue decline from a top cloud customer in the Internet industry. This customer, which has a sizeable presence outside of China that used our overseas cloud services in the past, has decided to terminate the relationship with respect to their international business due to non-product related requirements. Excluding this customer, Alibaba Cloud’s top ten non-affiliated customers together accounted for no more than eight percent of Alibaba Cloud’s total revenue in fiscal year 2021. Going forward, we believe that our cloud computing revenue will be further diversified across customers and industries." He also warned that the lost customer (and the potential departure of others) will affect the company's revenues for some time to come.