Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) unit continued to deliver a strong performance in the fourth quarter of its financial year ended March 31, as the company pushes for the technology’s increased adoption in more traditional industries.
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The company’s cloud computing and AI unit reported an 18 per cent revenue increase for the March quarter, representing the unit’s fastest growth since 2022, as AI-related sales recorded triple-digit growth for the seventh consecutive quarter. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
“In cloud computing, it has clear market leadership as the backbone of digitalisation across different industries,” Jefferies analysts Thomas Chong and Zoey Zong said in a research note on Thursday.
During an earnings call on Thursday, Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu Yongming highlighted internet services, autonomous driving, financial services and online education as areas seeing faster AI adoption. Meanwhile, the Hangzhou-based company is seeing growing momentum from more traditional industries such as animal farming and manufacturing, he added.
The company recently signed a major deal with the state-backed Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which adopted Alibaba Cloud’s database service PolarDB as its enterprise-wide transactional distributed database.
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“This represents a strong endorsement of our technological capabilities by one of the most demanding financial institutions in terms of business performance and technology requirements,” Wu said.