Business Corpus: Alibaba Quarterly Earnings Beat As Mobile Users Reach 617 MillionAlibaba reported quarterly earnings before the market open Friday that topped views and guided full-year revenue growth above consensus views. The post Alibaba Quarterly Earnings Beat As Mobile Users Reach 617 Million appeared first on Investor's Business Daily.

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Alibaba (BABA) on Friday reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings that topped views, with strong growth in e-commerce and cloud computing, as it guided full-year revenue growth above the consensus.

Before the market open, the China e-commerce leader reported revenue of $9.9 billion. That beat Wall Street predictions of $9.2 billion and was up 76% from the year-ago quarter. It said adjusted earnings were 91 cents per share, beating views for 88 cents, according to analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research.

The company has a long string of quarters with double-digit growth in revenue and earnings.

Alibaba sees revenue growth for fiscal year 2019 topping 60%, or more than 50% excluding acquired companies.

"At first glance, we remain positive on shares as Alibaba reported another strong quarter, with results and guidance well above consensus expectations," Baird analyst Colin Sebastian wrote in a note to clients. He has an outperform rating on Alibaba and a price target of 220.

Shares were initially down about 1.5% then reversed for a 3.5% gain, to 188.89 on the stock market today. Alibaba shares are up about 55% over the last 12 months.

Double-Digit Gains

Core commerce revenue jumped 62% to $8.2 billion and cloud revenue more than doubled to $699 million. Further, digital media and entertainment revenue increased 34% to $840 million. And sales from innovation and other initiatives grew 8% to $158 million.

Alibaba is the leading provider of cloud computing services and the largest e-commerce company in China. It's main competitor is JD.com (JD).

Alibaba's annual active consumers on Chinese retail marketplaces climbed to 552 million. That's up 37 million from the 12-month period ended Dec. 31. Gross merchandise volume for the fiscal year climbed 28% to $768 billion.

"With the continuing rollout of our New Retail strategy, our e-commerce platform is developing into the leading retail infrastructure of China," said Chief Executive Daniel Zhang, in prepared remarks with the earnings release.

Among its retail initiatives is Hema, a chain of digitized physical supermarkets. The idea is to draw customers deeper into Alibaba's consumer-facing ecosystem. It's a strategy comparable to what e-commerce leader Amazon.com (AMZN) is doing with its acquisition of Whole Foods Market.

"During the past year we also doubled down on technology development, cloud computing, logistics, digital entertainment and local services so that we are in a position to capture consumption growth in China and other emerging markets," said Zhang.

Alibaba ended the quarter with 617 million monthly active users on mobile devices, up 6%, or 37 million, from the previous quarter.

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The post Alibaba Quarterly Earnings Beat As Mobile Users Reach 617 Million appeared first on Investor's Business Daily.