One bright spot in Alibaba’s latest earnings report was its international e-commerce business unit, which posted revenue of 28.5 billion Chinese yuan ($4 billion) in the December quarter, up 44% from a year ago. Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group includes platforms like AliExpress, Lazada, Daraz and Trendyol.
“The strong performance was driven by solid growth across all of AIDC’s retail platforms, especially from the crossborder AliExpress Choice business,” the company said.
Meanwhile, revenue from the company’s core e-commerce businesses Taobao and Tmall Group was $18.1 billion, growing only 2% year-over-year.
“We will step up investment to improve users’ core experiences to drive growth in Taobao and Tmall Group and strengthen market leadership in the coming year. We will also focus our resources on developing public cloud products and sustaining the strong growth momentum in international commerce business,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said earlier this month.
The tightening of the ship is likely designed to consolidate growth trajectories, de-risk uncertainties of operating in multiple, competitive markets …
Despite AIDC’s strong sales growth, losses also surged year-over-year mostly from “increased investment in businesses, including AliExpress’ Choice and Trendyol’s international business, partly offset by improvements in monetization.”
Subsidiary shakeup
The quarterly results follow a series of management shuffles at Alibaba and its subunits. Pakistan e-commerce platform Daraz replaced its CEO Bjarke Mikkelsen on Jan. 24. James Dong, CEO of Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Lazada Group, was named as Daraz’s acting CEO. The company said he would “work on a deeper integration between Daraz and our sister companies.”
In early January, Lazada executed a mass layoff across Southeast Asia, which affected employees of all levels including senior management. The cuts hit all departments including commercial, retail and marketing.
People at Alibaba International familiar with the matter told CNBC that the Lazada layoffs were intended to “streamline decision-making and boost organizational and business efficiency.”
“These latest management shake-ups have their roots in the Alibaba split last year, largely a strategy to navigate the regulatory developments in China which have long put pressure on the tech giant,” said Yinglan Tan, founding managing partner at Insignia Ventures Partners.
“AIDC’s nature as a portfolio of diverse and individually complex businesses ranging from Daraz to Lazada also plays a key factor. The tightening of the ship is likely designed to consolidate growth trajectories, de-risk uncertainties of operating in multiple, competitive markets …,” said Tan.
Leadership changes
In March, Alibaba had said it would split itself into six business units and pave the way for individual stock listings. Zhang told investors the move would allow Alibaba’s business “to become more agile, enhance their business decision-making, and respond faster to market changes.”
“Keeping their organisations agile and adaptable is always at the top of the agenda of Chinese tech leaders. This has been made even more urgent with the rise of competitors and changes in the external environment,” said Momentum Works in a January report titled “Understanding Alibaba’s most radical changes in history.”
Mirroring its parent company’s moves, Lazada’s leadership team has also seen its fair share of changes in recent years.
Dong took over as Lazada Group CEO from Chun Li in June 2022, after running the company’s Thailand and Vietnam operations. Prior to that, Dong was head of globalization strategy and corporate development at Alibaba Group and a one-time business assistant to former CEO Zhang.
In 2020, Li took over the role from Pierre Poignant, who succeeded Lucy Peng in December 2018, who was just nine months into the job.
China-based PDD Holdings reported third-quarter revenue nearly doubled, far outpacing Alibaba‘s 9% growth during the same period. PDD said revenue in the quarter was $9.44 billion, up 94% from $4.99 billion in the same quarter of 2022. Alibaba posted 9% year-on-year revenue growth in the third quarter to about $31 billion.
Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares have plunged from an all-time high of 309.4 Hong Kong dollars ($39.59) on Oct. 28, 2020, according to LSEG data. Shares closed at HK$71.50 on Monday.
Venezuelan Bolivar and U.S. Dollar banknotes and representations of cryptocurrency Tether are seen in this illustration taken Sept. 8, 2025.
Dado Ruvic | Array
Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin, is planning to raise as much as $20 billion in a deal that could put the crypto company’s value on par with OpenAI, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
The crypto company is looking to raise between $15 billion and $20 billion in exchange for a roughly 3% stake through a private placement, the report said, citing two individuals familiar with the matter. The transaction would involve new equity rather than existing investors selling their stakes, the people told the news service.
The report said that one person close to the matter warned that the talks are in an early stage, which means that the eventual details, including the size of the offering, could change.
However, the deal could ultimately value Tether at around $500 billion, according to the report. That would mean the crypto giant’s valuation would rival some of the world’s biggest private companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. OpenAI’s fundraising round earlier this year valued the tech company at $300 billion.
Tether, which was once accused of being a criminal’s “go-to cryptocurrency,” has been furthering its plans to return to the U.S. in recent months, given President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto stance. The company earlier this month named a CEO for its U.S. business and launched a new token for businesses and institutions in the U.S. called USAT, which will be regulated in the U.S. under the GENIUS Act.
Stablecoin USD Tether (USDT) is pegged to the U.S. dollar with a market cap that recently surpassed $172 billion. In second place is Tether rival Circle’s USDC stablecoin, which is worth about $74 billion.
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.
Google-owned YouTube on Tuesday said it will soon allow previously banned accounts to apply for reinstatement, rolling back a policy that had treated violations as permanent.
The change applies to channels removed for posting Covid-19 or election-related misinformation, according to a letter fromAlphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Previously, those types of offenses carried lifetime bans.
“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding Covid and elections integrity,” Donovan wrote.
YouTube wrote on X that it will be a limited pilot project open to a subset of creators as well as channels that were terminated under policies the company has since retired. YouTube also said its new reinstatement program will launch soon.
Among channels previously banned under those rules were some associated with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s not yet clear whether those channels will be reinstated.
This move follows mounting Republican pressure on tech companies to reverse Biden-era speech policies on vaccine and political misinformation. In March, Rep. Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging YouTube was a “direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”
In 2021, YouTube said it would remove content that spread misinformation about all approved vaccines.
Donovan wrote that during the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials pressed the company to remove certain Covid-related videos that did not technically violate YouTube’s policies.
In the letter, Donovan said this pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
YouTube ended its stand-alone Covid misinformation rules in December 2024, according to Donovan’s letter.
YouTube “will not empower third-party fact-checkers” to moderate content and will continue to enable “free expression” on the platform, Donovan wrote. While Donovan writes that YouTube has not used fact-checkers, the platform has produced programs that are meant to label context on videos.
Similarly, Meta said in January that it had eliminated its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube has a feature that will display information panels with links to independent fact checks under videos. The feature says it provides more context on videos across YouTube with information from third-party sources.
In 2017, Google launched a fact-checking tool that would display labels on search and news results.