File Photo/NBD

On the evening of February 7, just before the arrival of the Spring Festival of the Dragon Year, Alibaba Group released its results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024.

The financial report shows that Alibaba (NYSE: BABA, stock price 73.67 US dollars, total market value 187.609 billion US dollars) achieved revenue of 260.35 billion yuan in this quarter, a year-on-year increase of 5%; net profit was 10.717 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 77%.

After the announcement of a number of strategic changes in the previous quarterly report, Alibaba is still shrouded in uncertainty.

On December 20, 2023, Alibaba announced that Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group and Chairman of Taobao Group, would also serve as CEO of Taobao Group. Two days later, Zhang announced a new round of organizational adjustments at Taobao, with a young management team taking over.

Since then, in early February, there have been market rumors that Alibaba is considering selling Yintai, a department store and shopping mall operator under its umbrella. Ele.me also denied the rumors of "being acquired by ByteDance" twice in a month.

As of press time, although Alibaba has not yet responded to NBD on this news. However, in the evening of February 7, on the earnings call, Joseph Tsai, chairman of the board of directors of Alibaba Group, clearly responded to the question of selling non-core assets, saying that traditional physical retail business is not Alibaba's core business, and it is reasonable to withdraw from such business, but it takes time. At the same time, it was disclosed that in the past 9 months of fiscal year 2024, Alibaba has already withdrawn from 1.7 billion US dollars of non-core assets.

Alibaba's transformation is still on the way. Looking at the financial report of this quarter, the development of some businesses may affect Alibaba's future.