Jack Ma's data ambitions get investor green light

Shares of the e-commerce giant soared more than 10% in the early morning USA session, after the Alibaba Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu said at the firm's investor conference on Thursday that revenue growth would accelerate in the region of 45% to 49% for this year. "The main driver is the power of their data analytics platform, as they can provide very detailed and accurate consumer targeting for advertisers, who are increasingly keen to spend money with Alibaba".

Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma at the Davos forum 2017.

That's helped the company chalk up US$547 billion in gross merchandise volume – the value of goods sold through the platform – for the year ended March 31, for which the operator charges a fee. Alibaba disclosed last month that its cloud, media and other businesses made an operating loss of over 18 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) in the fiscal year on 24 billion yuan of revenue.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba expects its turnover to grow 45 to 49 % in the current fiscal year, according to CFO Maggie Wu in an investor call.

Jack Ma's big data ambitions have gotten a stamp of approval from investors.

Wu added the company would reinvest funds to expand its consumer base, improve customer's experience of its products, in a bid to gain the B2C market share. It's a powerful vindication of Ma's forays into AI and cloud technology. Separately from the Lazada division, the company's growth was close to 44-45 percent, according to Wu. By the end of the day, Alibaba had taken the title of China's most valuable publicly-listed company back from rival Tencent.