Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu's letter to shareholders: In the AI era, Alibaba will think and act like a startup

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, on June 26, Alibaba Group (09988) released its annual report for the fiscal year 2025. In the letter to shareholders, Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu stated that looking ahead, a new era brought by the global AI technology wave is beginning. Alibaba must adopt a mindset of starting from scratch, thinking and acting like a startup to seize and create opportunities. "As we told our Alibaba family on 'Ali Day', we also want to convey this to our investors—there is no preservation in Alibaba's genes, only creation. Today's Alibaba is embarking on a new journey towards the AI era with the posture of an entrepreneur."

The shareholder letter shared Alibaba's strategic execution and business progress over the past fiscal year. In the past fiscal year, Alibaba focused on two core businesses: e-commerce and "AI + Cloud," achieving accelerated business growth. Alibaba also increased its investment in cloud and AI infrastructure, accelerating the innovation and implementation of AI technology across various industries. At the same time, Alibaba has orderly exited assets such as Hema Retail and Intime Department Store, while steadily improving the operational efficiency of multiple internet platform businesses, with businesses like Whale Entertainment and Amap achieving quarterly profitability one after another.

The shareholder letter mentioned that Alibaba's first strategic focus is "User First," a strategy that permeates all internet platform businesses. For example, in e-commerce, over the past fiscal year, Taobao and Tmall continued to invest in enhancing user experience while optimizing the merchant operating ecosystem, creating a sustainable development environment for consumers, merchants, and the platform to win together. These efforts have continuously yielded results, with increased trust from consumers and merchants in the platform, leading to accelerated business growth.

The second strategic focus is "AI Driven." The shareholder letter pointed out, "Alibaba views AI as the core driving force for business growth and one of the greatest opportunities for future development. Therefore, we are fully committed to building AI infrastructure and technological advancement to enhance our competitiveness in the global technology field and transform it into a sustained momentum for business growth." Driven by AI demand, Alibaba Cloud's full-year revenue achieved double-digit growth, and revenue from AI-related products has seen triple-digit growth for seven consecutive quarters.

The shareholder letter also highlighted Alibaba's strategic layout and thinking in the field of AI large models. In the past fiscal year, Alibaba promoted foundational research and innovation in large models while expanding open-source initiatives. The Tongyi Qwen 3 model released in April has performed well on multiple authoritative evaluation lists globally. As of the end of April, Alibaba Tongyi has open-sourced over 200 models, with the number of derivative models exceeding 100,000, becoming the largest open-source model family in the world. "We believe that our open-source and open approach will enable global participants to collaboratively develop human intelligence based on our models and jointly achieve the long-term goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)," the shareholder letter stated.

The development of AI technology is bringing significant changes to the industry, and Alibaba sees greater development opportunities ahead. In the AI era, Alibaba is in an excellent strategic position in the market—occupying an important position in China's cloud computing market, as the largest cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud is also accelerating the creation of a global cloud computing network and the internationalization of AI products, supporting the globalization of Chinese enterprises, which contains enormous development opportunities. "We are confident that, relying on our talent, technology, and resources, we will seize development opportunities and build the 'AI + Cloud'-centric technology business into Alibaba's second growth curve."