Chinese tech giant Alibaba has reported tiny revenue growth, but a 106 percent surge in earnings for its cloud services, despite a marked slowdown in demand.
The two outcomes are linked: CEO Daniel Zhang told investors who tuned into a Q2 earnings call “The growth rate was negatively impacted by the normalization of CDN demand as usage of video streaming, remote working, and remote learning came down when offline activities resumed after pandemic measures were lifted.”
But less traffic meant lower costs. Zhang said Alibaba’s Teams-like collaboration tool DingTalk – which is part of Alibaba Cloud – reported “reduced co-location and bandwidth costs … as a result of normalized usage after the pandemic.”
The Chinese cloud champ also improved server utilization rates, and Zhang was also pleased with an “enhanced product mix and efficiency improvement” and “proactive efforts to manage revenue from project-based cloud services.”
Those factors left Alibaba Cloud with quarterly revenue of $3.465 billion – fairly meager four percent year over year growth. But EBIDTA for the cloudy business unit popped by 106 percent to $53 million thanks to those lower costs.
Zhang made much of Alibaba’s many changes designed to make its cloud capable of handling AI workloads, and the decision to open source its own AI models to drive engagement and consumption. He predicted doing so will boost growth at Alibaba Cloud in coming quarters and years.