BEIJING, May 26 (TMTPOST)— The U.S.-listed shares of Alibaba and Baidu all skyrocketed more than 14% on Thursday as these Chinese tech giants’ financial results for the past quarter beat the Wall Street expectations, defying a prolonged economic slowdown, the regulatory tightening on tech sector and Covid lockdowns in China.

Source: Visual China

Alibaba’s revenue rose 8.9% to RMB204.05 billion (US$30.35 billion) for the three months ended March, beating the analysts’ projection of RMB200.59 billion, though it recorded with the slowest year-over-year (YoY) growth since its U.S. listing in 2014. Its adjusted earnings per American depositary shares (ADSs) came to RMB7.95, versus the RMB 7.10 projected by analysts. EBITDA, or Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization, dropped 22% YoY to RMB19.8 billion, but ahead of the analyst estimates of RMB22.03 billion.

 Alibaba skipped financial guidance for the year as it felt hard to predict and “not prudent” to give the outlook, citing risks and uncertainties resulted from the Covid pandemic. As of the end of March, Alibaba achieved its target of serving 10 billion active consumers during a 12-month period, and the annual gross merchandise value (GMV) reached RMB8,137 billion, the Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said. Despite the impact on supply chain and consumers’ spending appetite due to macroeconomic challenge, the company kept improving operations in key strategic sectors, and will continue to stick to the multi-engine-driving strategy, enhance building digital commerce infrastructure, and focus on the growth with high quality, according to Zhang.

Baidu’ revenue edged up 1% YoY to RMB28.41 billion (US$4.48 billion) in the March quarter, beating analysts’ expectation of RMB27.86 billion. It posted adjusted earnings per ADS of RMB11.22 and adjusted EBITDA of RMB5.5 billion, both topping the market consensus projections. Baidu’s networking revenue that quarter increased 4% YoY while the non-networking segment see a more robust growth of 35% in revenue, driven by cloud and other artificial intelligence (AI) businesses as sales of Baidu AI cloud jumped 45% yearly.

Baidu showed the solid results in the first quarter, especially in the cloud and intelligent autonomous  driving, the founder, chairman and chief executive Robin Li commented. Li admitted the Covid related challenges weighed on his company’s business in the near term since businesses had been hit by Covid-related affects since the mid March. Nevertheless, the company still believes that the new AI business will promote its growth in the long run, and make contribution for China’s innovation-driven economy and sustainable development, he said.

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