Alibaba sees rocketing global revenue as Lazada grows

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Alibaba, China’s top online shopping company, is now seeing the fruits of its recent forays outside of its home country.

Jack Ma’s company pulled in a record US$389 million from its marketplaces outside China from April to June, it said this evening in its newest earnings report. That’s up 136 percent from the year prior.

“The increase was primarily due to the growth in revenue generated from Lazada and AliExpress, driven by robust GMV growth” – that means how much people are spending – “in these two marketplaces,” Alibaba stated.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Photo credit: Alibaba.

Lazada – which Alibaba acquired in April 2016 – operates in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The buyout marked Alibaba’s first attempt to take its marketplace outside of China, where it launched the wildly popular Taobao in 2003.

(Update shortly after publishing: Alibaba just led US$1.1 billion in funding for Tokopedia, a popular online store in Indonesia.)

466 million shoppers

Alibaba’s US$389 million pocketed from non-Chinese shoppers pales in comparison to its total online shopping revenue of US$6.3 billion for April to June, up 58 percent on the same period last year. Much of that is from shoppers on Taobao and Tmall, its twin Chinese marketplaces.

Across those two stores, Alibaba now has 466 million of what it calls “annual active consumers.” There must be a lot of window shoppers, as there are 529 million who peek into the shopping apps each month.

Total revenue from all Alibaba’s activities was US$7.4 billion, resulting in profit of US$2.1 billion.

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