Alibaba continues to grow spectacularly, buys Kaola

Alibaba Group seems to be handling the current trade war between China and the US quite well, as its turnover and profit growth went into double figures again. Moreover, the Chinese company is preparing the acquisition of competitor Kaola.

Exponential growth

Total quarterly turnover went up 42 % to 114.9 billion yuan (15 billion euros), while the number of active customers on Taobao and Tmall went up by only 3 % to 674 million. The group’s core business is still internal retail (with 66 % of total turnover), but cloud services continue to grow faster (+ 66 % to 7.79 billion yuan).

Net profit went up an enormous 150 % to 19.1 billion yuan (2.5 billion euros), but that is largely due to a highly costly share option deal last year. Excluding that one-time cost, profit growth would have been slightly over 25 %.

Acquisition

Several different media sources report that Alibaba would acquire its competitor Kaola for a sum just under two billion euros. Kaola is famous in China for selling a lot of foreign brands to Chinese customers.