China’s Alibaba beats quarterly revenue, profit estimates

(Reuters) – China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd beat quarterly revenue and profit estimates on Thursday as its core commerce and cloud computing businesses benefited from a shift to online shopping and working from home due to the coronavirus crisis.

The company’s U.S.-listed shares were up marginally before the bell. The stock has gained about 23% this year, but has faced pressure as U.S. President Donald Trump has said he could exert pressure on more Chinese companies after he moved to ban TikTok.

Sales from the company’s core commerce business jumped 34% to 133.32 billion yuan ($19.27 billion) in the three months ended June.

Alibaba said its domestic core commerce business has fully recovered to pre-COVID-19 levels, while cloud computing revenue surged 59% to 12.35 billion yuan.

Excluding items, the company earned 14.82 yuan per American depository share (ADS). Analysts had expected 13.78 yuan per ADS, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Revenue rose to 153.75 billion yuan in the first quarter from 114.92 billion yuan, a year earlier.

Analysts had expected revenue of 147.77 billion yuan.

($1 = 6.9189 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Nilanjana Basu and Akanksha Rana in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)