HANGZHOU, May 22 (Xinhua) -- China's e-commerce giant Alibaba on Friday reported a rosy quarterly revenue despite the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The group's revenue in the quarter ending March 31 stood at 114.31 billion yuan (about 16 billion U.S. dollars), marking an increase of 22 percent year-on-year.
The Hangzhou-based company also announced revenue of 509.7 billion yuan in its fiscal year ending March 31, up 35 percent over the year-earlier level.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said the company's overall business continued to experience strong growth, with a total annual active consumer base of 960 million globally, despite concluding the fiscal year with a quarter impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Despite a challenging quarter due to reduced economic activities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, we achieved our annual revenue guidance of over 500 billion yuan. Revenue growth of 35 percent year-over-year was driven by solid performance of our domestic retail businesses as well as robust cloud computing revenue growth," said Maggie Wu, chief financial officer of Alibaba Group.
"The pandemic has fundamentally altered consumer behavior and enterprise operations, making digital adoption and transformation a necessity," Zhang said. Enditem
