Alibaba

[dreamybear]

Its 2023-Q3 is a long but good read to find out what the new CEO/Chairman are focusing on, below the transcript:
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-trans...transcrip/

Their priorities of usage of cash are in below order:
1. Investing in their Core Businesses.
2. Buying back shares.
Since 1-Jul to 15-Nov, have repurchased approximately $3B, which accounted for 1.3% of total shares outstanding.
Chairman Joe: have $13B of dry powder left & will continue to execute that buyback.
3. Dividend.
First time ever dividend of $0.125 per share or $1 per ADS.
The aggregate amount of the dividend will be about $2.5B.

New management key focus:
1) Focus on growing core businesses (ie: eCommerce, Cloud, etc) >> Lazada likely fall under this bucket.
2) Monetize Non-core businesses (divest, spin-off etc) >> XPeng likely fall under this bucket.
3) Sharpen the focus of each Major Business, cases in point:
- Taobao to focus on putting customer first and expand to be Super App or to quote Trudy Dai (Taobao group CEO):
"As we said, there's no question that the Taobao app has everything you could want or need. The only question is, can you think of everything you need? Or going forward, even if you can't think of what you need, no matter, the Taobao app will help you do the thinking."
The above I personally feel Taobao improvement in their search & recommendation (eg: just search for japan street style and there you go, the clothes, pants and whatnot).
- Expand Ali Express Choice (AE Choice), to quote Jiang Fan (Int group CEO):
"Looking ahead, we see some high-confidence market opportunities, including further expansion of AE Choice and opportunities in some emerging markets. Over the next few quarters, our short-term business focus will be on rapidly expanding our business scale and market share."

To me, Bytedance & PDD are definitely eating away their shares, but with their valuation and urgency to CHANGE (recently Ma couldn't help but to "praise" PDD to rally his troops), I am willing to bet on this horse.

I think OPMIs have to factor in "sum-of-parts" i.e. views of mgmt + Beijing.

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https://www.straitstimes.com/business/wh...down-ended
"And Beijing has made clear it sees China’s technological future not in video games and online marketplaces, but in industries that are more pivotal to its geopolitical conflict with the United States, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors."