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The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced Thursday, November 17 a quarterly loss of 2.7 billion euros, in a context of economic slowdown in China: health restrictions due to Covid-19 and the uncertainty which accompanies are a brake on consumption and weigh heavily on the balance sheet of these e-commerce companies.
China has been facing a resurgence of the Covid-19 epidemic for several months, which has consequences for household consumption. Retail sales in October recorded their first contraction in six months. In this gloomy economic context, Alibaba, shows a drop of 1% over one year of its sales in China.
Even for the famous “singles party” which ended on November 11, and which usually gives rise to monster sales online, the group has not communicated any sales figures.
E-commerce companies, accustomed until now to exponential growth with the trivialization of purchases on the internet, are the first to be affected by this gloomy context.
Sign of these difficulties, the Hangzhou group, in eastern China, has separated from nearly 15,000 employees, according to a comparison of its workforce with the same quarter of last year.
And its poor performance is far from an isolated case in China in the tech world.
This week, the internet and video game giant Tencent announced a further decline in its quarterly turnover.