BEIJING, November 18 (TMTPOST)— Chinese e-Commerce giants posted mixed results in the past quarter. Alibaba missed both in top and bottom line and cut its outlook in the full fiscal year, while JD.com reported better-than-expected sales and earnings in third quarter after it showed a growth much robust than Alibaba in the annual shopping event Singles Day ended a week ago.

Source: Visual China

For the twelve months as of September 30, Alibaba had about 1.24 billion global Annual Active Consumers (AACs) including 953 million from china, better than analysts’ prediction of 846.6 million AACs in its home market, but the second fiscal quarter ended the same day saw the revenue of RMB200.69 billion (US$31.4 billion) with 29% year-over-year (YoY) increase, weaker than analysts’ forecast of RMB206.17 billion, and the Non-GAAP diluted earnings per American depository share (ADS) decreased 38% from a year ago to RMB11.20 (US$1.74), short of RMB12.37 that analysts expected. As a sign of lackluster performance, Alibaba recorded single-digit physical goods Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) YoY growth, which was mainly blamed to slowing market conditions and more players in the China e-commerce market. The company had another disappoint result by slashing the revenue growth for the whole fiscal year 2022 from 29.7% to a range between 20% and 23%, compared with analysts’ projection of 27%.

In comparison with Alibaba’s struggle to maintain strong growth under the regulatory tightening and uncertain macroeconomic environment, its competitor JD demonstrated a surprising resilience. During the quarter ended September 30, its net sales was up 25.5% YoY to RMB218.7 billion (US$34.3 billion), beating the analysts’ forecast of RMB215.61 billion, and the Non-GAAP net income was RMB5.05 billion (US$792 million) with a fall of 9% from a year ago, much better than the Wall Street forecast of RMB3.26 billion which suggests a YoY decrease of 41%. At the end of that quarter, JD’s annual active customer accounts reached 552 million, with a net addition of 110 million from a year earlier. Longbridge Securities noted that the 26% of JD’s revenue growth in the quarter was particularly outstanding given the whole industry’s growth slowed down to 8% the same period.

Though not giving revenue guidance, JD had showed upbeat message last week, when it disclosed a total of RMB349.1 billion (US$48.6 billion) in sales during Singles Day ended November 11, rising 28.6% from last year’s eleven-day promotion. The growth was much stronger than Alibaba’s YoY GMV growth of 8.5%, which also made market observers more confident about JD’s better performance in the fourth quarter.  

After reporting results of the third quarter, JD witnessed a 6% surge of its U.S.-listed shares on Thursday, while Alibaba’s shares listed on NYSE closed more than 11% lower.