BABA declined 0.8% following several recent developments. Alibaba's AI app Qwen processed nearly 200 million orders during the Lunar New Year holiday, driven by promotional giveaway campaigns that boosted user adoption across Chinese tech companies. Alibaba Cloud launched Qwen 3.5-Plus, a new large language model with 397 billion parameters and significantly improved efficiency, with API pricing set at 0.8 RMB per million tokens. The model achieves up to 19 times increased inference throughput in certain scenarios. However, on February 18, Erste Group downgraded Alibaba from Buy to Hold, citing concerns that operating margins have dropped and long-term debt has increased. The analyst expects the stock to trade sideways in the medium term. Major Chinese stocks have experienced volatility since the Hong Kong market reopened following the Lunar New Year holiday.
Read full analysisBABA declined 0.8% following several recent developments. Alibaba's AI app Qwen processed nearly 200 million orders during the Lunar New Year holiday, driven by promotional giveaway campaigns that boosted user adoption across Chinese tech companies. Alibaba Cloud launched Qwen 3.5-Plus, a new large language model with 397 billion parameters and significantly improved efficiency, with API pricing set at 0.8 RMB per million tokens. The model achieves up to 19 times increased inference throughput in certain scenarios. However, on February 18, Erste Group downgraded Alibaba from Buy to Hold, citing concerns that operating margins have dropped and long-term debt has increased. The analyst expects the stock to trade sideways in the medium term. Major Chinese stocks have experienced volatility since the Hong Kong market reopened following the Lunar New Year holiday.
Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce and cloud computing conglomerate, operating platforms including Taobao, Tmall, and Alibaba Cloud. The company has drawn investor attention for aggressive AI investment — its Qwen 3.5 model processed nearly 200 million orders over the Lunar New Year holiday — while navigating U.S.-China geopolitical friction, most recently the Pentagon's designation of Alibaba as a Chinese military-linked company, which has weighed on shares throughout February.