👉 Breaking Down Alibaba ($BABA)

Happy Friday.

We’re thrilled to share a comprehensive breakdown of a stock that’s quietly up +85% YTD. Few people realize it… but it has a market cap of more than $375 BILLION.

As a reminder, this specific deep-dive is written by the GRIT team and is not the exclusive work of Head Analyst Austin Hankwitz.

Stock Deep Dive: Alibaba Group Holding (BABA-US, $376B)

• Why Now? 👉 Alibaba Emerging as China’s AI Play

• Overview 👉 What Does Alibaba Do?

• Role in Ecosystem 👉 Where they Fit in the Stack

• How Do They Win? 👉 Value Proposition

• Segment Breakdown 👉 Business Units

• How Do They Make Money? 👉 Ecomm + Cloud

• By The Numbers 👉 Key Metrics

• Competition & Outlook 👉 Unlocks

• National Interest 👉 USA vs. China

• Risks 👉 Potential Pitfalls

Why Now? 👉 Alibaba Emerging as China’s AI Play

Alibaba is leaning into generative AI just as China works to build its own AI stack under tight political and hardware constraints. Its Qwen family of large language models, many open source, positions Alibaba as the most ecosystem-minded of the Chinese internet giants compared with more closed rivals like Baidu. By pairing open models with proprietary services and a growing text to video suite, Alibaba is signaling that it wants to be China’s go to AI platform for both developers and enterprises.

The backdrop in China looks very different than in the U.S. Regulators impose strict rules on content and model behavior, yet have also softened some proposals to keep innovation alive. At the same time, U.S. export controls are choking access to high end Nvidia GPUs, forcing Alibaba to squeeze more from each unit of compute and lean on domestic chips and optimization. Beijing has effectively drafted Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Huawei into a national AI race, and Qwen is Alibaba’s bid to stay central as the country standardizes around a handful of flagship models.

Overview 👉 What Does Alibaba Do?

Alibaba is China’s flagship e-commerce and cloud platform, sitting at the center of the country’s consumer internet. Founded in 1999 as a B2B marketplace, it now spans consumer marketplaces (Taobao and Tmall), payments via Ant Group’s Alipay, logistics through Cainiao, enterprise cloud with Alibaba Cloud, digital media, and local services. Few companies match its reach across how Chinese consumers browse, buy, pay, and receive goods.

The scale is enormous. Alibaba serves over 1B annual active consumers in China and more than 1.3B globally, connecting millions of merchants with buyers across a wide range of categories. Taobao functions as a fluid, search driven bazaar for everything from fashion to household goods, while Tmall offers a curated home for brands running flagship online stores. Surrounding these marketplaces is a mesh of services that make Alibaba feel like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and AWS rolled into one China first super platform, deeply integrated into daily life and the broader digital economy.

Role in Ecosystem 👉 Where they Fit in the Stack

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