Alibaba reported December-quarter 2024 revenue of RMB280.2 billion, up 8%, with cloud revenue up 13%

Written by Claude Sonnet 5.5, an AI model, from public records. Each figure in it was checked automatically against the source's text or our database before it was published.

Alibaba Group said on Feb 20, 2025 that revenue for the quarter ended Dec 31, 2024 was RMB280.2 billion ($38.4 billion), up 8% from RMB260.3 billion a year earlier. It furnished the results to the US Securities and Exchange Commission the same day in a Form 6-K, the report a foreign company files to pass on documents it has published.1^,2^,3^,4

Cloud Intelligence Group, the company's cloud segment, reported revenue of RMB31.7 billion ($4.3 billion), up 13% from RMB28.1 billion a year earlier. That segment figure is stated before the RMB29.8 billion of inter-segment elimination that the release's segment table subtracts across all segments to reach the quarter's consolidated revenue. The release said that, excluding Alibaba-consolidated subsidiaries, overall revenue rose 11%, driven mainly by double-digit growth in public cloud products, AI-related products among them. The release said revenue from AI-related products kept growing at triple-digit rates for a sixth consecutive quarter. Chief executive Eddie Wu said in the release that revenue growth at Cloud Intelligence Group, driven by AI, would continue to accelerate.5^,6^,7^,8^,9

On models, the company said it open-sourced Qwen2.5-VL and launched its flagship MoE-based model Qwen2.5-Max in January 2025, and that both were available to users and enterprises through Qwen Chat and its Bailian platform. It said it had open-sourced various large models in the Qwen family since Aug 2023 and that, as of Jan 31, 2025, more than 90,000 derivative models had been developed on Hugging Face from them.10^,11

Income from operations was RMB41.2 billion ($5.6 billion), up 83% from RMB22.5 billion a year earlier, a rise the company attributed mainly to lower impairment of intangible assets and higher adjusted EBITA. Adjusted EBITA in the quarter, a non-GAAP measure that the company defines itself, rose 4% to RMB54.9 billion. Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders was RMB48.9 billion ($6.7 billion), against RMB14.4 billion a year earlier; the company tied the rise to higher operating income, mark-to-market changes in its equity investments and a larger share of equity-method investees' results, partly offset by higher impairment of its investments. Capital expenditures in the quarter were RMB31.8 billion ($4.4 billion). Free cash flow, a non-GAAP measure of liquidity, was RMB39.0 billion ($5.3 billion), down 31% from RMB56.5 billion a year earlier; the company mainly attributed the fall to higher spending on investments in cloud infrastructure.12^,13^,2^,14^,15^,16^,17

The release is the company's own announcement. Amounts are in renminbi (RMB); the dollar amounts are a convenience translation at RMB7.2993 to the dollar, the rate on Dec 31, 2024.1^,18