Alibaba Cloud achieves first annual profit, but revenue growth slows in fiscal 2022

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Reporter | She Xiaochen

On the evening of May 26, Alibaba announced its fourth quarter 2022 and fiscal 2022 results. Among them, Alibaba Cloud’s EBITA profit has improved from a loss of 2.251 billion yuan in fiscal year 2021 to a profit of 1.146 billion yuan in fiscal year 2022, which is the first annual profit of Alibaba Cloud since its establishment 13 years ago.

Calculated by offsetting the cross-segment transaction (deducting the revenue from providing services for other Alibaba businesses), Alibaba Cloud’s revenue has increased from 1.271 billion yuan in fiscal year 2015 to fiscal year 2022 (April 2021 to 2022). 74.568 billion yuan at the end of March 2018, an increase of 57 times in 8 years.

In the fourth fiscal quarter, Alibaba Cloud’s business revenue increased by 12% year-on-year to 18.971 billion yuan. However, in fiscal year 2022, Alibaba Cloud’s revenue increased by 23% year-on-year compared to fiscal year 2021, and the growth rate has slowed down ( in fiscal year 2021, revenue from cloud computing business increased by 50% year-on-year). The financial report explained that this was mainly due to the fact that the leading customers in the Internet industry gradually stopped using Alibaba Cloud services in their international business due to non-product-related reasons, and the demand from customers in the Internet industry in China slowed down.

Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: “Alibaba Cloud will focus on building the underlying technology and core product competitiveness, develop a sustainable partner system, and further promote the integration of cloud nails and internationalization strategies.”

The financial report shows that in terms of user scale, Alibaba Cloud has more than 4 million paying customers. In the past year, Alibaba Cloud has added five new data centers, located in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Germany. As of now, Alibaba Cloud operates 84 availability zones in 27 regions around the world, and has the largest cloud infrastructure in Asia.

In the analyst conference call after the release of the financial report, Xu Hong, chief financial officer of Alibaba Group, disclosed that in the past year, Alibaba’s technology investment exceeded 120 billion yuan.