Just over a year ago, with Alibaba facing an antitrust investigation and founder Jack Ma under political pressure, finance chief Maggie Wu was quick to talk up the company’s rapidly expanding and uncontroversial cloud business to investors.
“China is going to be the largest economy in 10 years’ time, enterprises and millions of businesses will migrate to cloud,” she said at a Goldman Sachs conference last February, according to notes provided to the Financial Times.
But Wu’s suggestions that Ali Cloud’s 50 per cent year-on-year growth rate was sustainable proved overly optimistic. Today, growth has stagnated at its cloud computing division, with sales up just 12 per cent in the first quarter of 2022 from a year earlier. Top rival Tencent reported its cloud arm shrank in the same period.