Major Chinese tech companies publicly traded in the US including Alibaba, JD.com and Baidu reported double-digit growth in revenue in the second quarter, reflecting a digital transformation dividend in the country that has been accelerating with the world’s recovery from the pandemic.
Alibaba announced its financial results for the quarter ended on June 30 on Thursday. Its revenue increased 34 percent year-on-year to 153.75 billion yuan ($21.76 billion). Its net income was 39.47 billion yuan during the period, up 28 percent year-on-year.
Alibaba CFO Maggie Wu said in a press release that the company’s domestic core commerce business had fully recovered to pre-COVID-19 levels, while cloud computing revenue grew 59 percent year-on-year.
During the same period, another e-commerce giant JD.com reported net revenues of 201.1 billion yuan, up 33.8 percent year-on-year. Its net income for the quarter surged to 16.4 billion yuan, 26 times greater than during the same period last year.
Baidu saw its revenue decline 1 percent year-on-year to 26 billion in the quarter, whereas its net income reached nearly 3.6 billion yuan, up 48 percent year-on-year.
The robust growth comes as China’s digital transformation picks up steam amid the global pandemic, in both consumption and enterprise operations.
Observers say Chinese tech companies still face increased risks as they expand their business overseas amid growing geopolitical tensions and tech decoupling by countries such as the US.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled on August 5 a five-pronged approach to extend its so-called “clean network,” which includes discouraging the use of cloud services offered by Chinese internet giants Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.
During a telephone conference held on Thursday, Alibaba said that its business in the US is mainly focused on helping American brands and small businesses sell globally and it is closely following changes in US policies toward Chinese companies and will come up with new compliance measures if required.
“We believe international trade and cooperation will continue and we believe our mission of ‘making it easy to do business anywhere’ fulfills both China’s and the US’ interests,” Alibaba Chairman Zhang Yong said during the conference.
Photo: Xinhua
