Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba posted another quarter of strong profit and revenue gains as it recorded robust growth across all of its business lines.

The company’s net profit for its fiscal Q1 (calendar Q2) jumped 96 per cent year-on-year to CNY14 billion ($2.07 billion), with revenue increasing 56 per cent to CNY50.2 billion.

Alibaba said the growth was driven by a 58 per cent increase in its core e-commerce business (CNY43 billion) and 96 per cent growth in revenue at Alibaba Cloud (CNY2.43 billion). Its e-commerce buinessses, both retail and wholesale, accounted for 86 per cent of total revenue, nearly unchanged from the same period in 2016.

Mobile active users (MAUs) in its China retail marketplaces increased 24 per cent year-on-year to 529 million. The company credited the growth to upgrades to its Taobao shopping app, which had a user interface makeover in May to integrate new personalisation technology.

Annual active consumers on its China retail marketplaces rose 7.4 per cent to 466 million.

Non-China gains
Alibaba said revenue from its international commerce retail business reached meaningful scale at CNY2.64 billion in the quarter, representing 136 per cent year-on-year growth, driven by strong results in its Southeast Asian platform Lazada and its China outbound platform AliExpress.

Its digital media and entertainment business increased 30 per cent year-on-year to CNY4.1 billion. The company said its focus on broadening access to quality content, developing video site Youku’s subscription based business, and expanding the products and services of mobile internet unit UCWeb was starting to show results. It noted daily average subscribers of Youku video subscriptions increased more than 100 per cent year-on-year in the quarter.

The number of paying customers for its cloud computing service grew to 1.01 million at end-June, an increase of 137,000 from the previous quarter.