Alibaba reaches 407m shoppers who spent $149b in Q4

Photo credit: gato gato gato.

Alibaba, China’s ecommerce giant, now has 407 million annual active shoppers, the company said this evening in its Q4 2015 earnings report. That’s a record high, up from 334 million at the end of 2014.

All those shoppers spent US$149 billion on its China marketplaces – primarily Taobao and Tmall – in the final three months of last year. The figure is up 23 percent year-on-year. Alibaba claims this outpaces the nation’s 10.7 percent retail sales growth over the same period.

That spending figure is the equivalent of the average shopper on Alibaba’s Chinese stores spending US$366 per person.

“Ecommerce in China continues to expand rapidly even as the Chinese economy slows, which should continue to help Alibaba grow for the foreseeable future,” explains eMarketer retail analyst Yoram Wurmser. China’s online shoppers spent an estimated US$672 billion in 2015, according to eMarketer data. That’s projected to blast past US$1 trillion in 2017.

Mo’ mobile

More and more shoppers are browsing and transacting on their phones or tablets, with 67 percent of that marketplace expenditure (the technical term is gross merchandise value, or GMV) happening on mobile devices. Alibaba passed the halfway on mobile GMV halfway through last year.

Mobile monthly active users (MAUs) on Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces grew to 393 million in December from 346 million in the prior quarter.

Image credit: Alibaba.

Aside from how much they spent, Alibaba managed to wring double the revenue out of mobile shoppers compared to what it managed in 2014.

Alibaba also said that its mobile-oriented on-demand services marketplace, Koubei, racked up US$2.4 billion in consumer expenditure during the quarter. Last month, it was seeing five million transactions on average per day.

That’s important for Alibaba because on-demand, hyperlocal stuff like food delivery and household cleaners are the next frontier of ecommerce – and so it’s a segment where Jack Ma’s company cannot afford to lose out to fast-growing startups that have popped up in the past couple of years. Alibaba set up in Koubei in June with a billion-dollar investment in conjunction with its spin-off finance division, Ant Financial.

See: 15 new startup unicorns that emerged in 2015

Mo’ money

Here are a few highlights on the biz side of things: