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China’s online shoppers started the year cautiously, Alibaba says



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Mascots for Alibaba’s various platforms are displayed at a shopping mall in Hangzhou, China, on Feb. 20, 2023.Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesBEIJING — For Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, the consumption rebound has yet to arrive in full.The company operates two of the largest online shopping sites in China, Taobao and Tmall. Despite a rise in competition, Alibaba’s results remain an important indicator on the economy.”From January to early February of this year, overall sales of online physical goods remained weak,” Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said Thursday during a quarterly earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.”Our China commerce continued to be highly impacted due to Covid cases as well as people traveling home or to other places during the Spring Festival holidays,” he said, referring to the Lunar New Year in late January. But Zhang said that after the holiday and the Covid wave, demand for apparel, sports and outdoors products recovered. China abruptly ended its stringent Covid controls in early December. Following a wave of Covid infections, business activity started to return to normal in the last two months. Rule changes allowed people to easily travel domestically and internationally again.Consumers in China still live in an economy dealing with a real estate slump and a drop in global demand for Chinese expor …

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