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The logo of the Alibaba office building is seen in the Huangpu District in Shanghai, June 16, 2023.

Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group is betting on its overseas businesses while domestic consumption growth remains sluggish.

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 …

Yinglan Tan

founding managing partner, Insignia Ventures Partners

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

Analyst explains why Alibaba's recent results 'don't matter that much'

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.

Intense competition

The e-commerce business that once propelled Alibaba to success has run into challenges with upstart competitors such as PDD, while consumption growth in China remains sluggish.

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.

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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