{"id":10693,"date":"2025-02-24T11:38:24","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T11:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/?p=10693"},"modified":"2025-02-24T11:38:24","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T11:38:24","slug":"alibaba-rose-on-china-ai-hopes-where-analysts-see-the-stock-heading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/?p=10693","title":{"rendered":"Alibaba rose on China AI hopes. Where analysts see the stock heading"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div data-test=\"articleBody-2\" data-analytics=\"RegularArticle-articleBody-5-2\">\n<p><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"ArticleBody-extraData\"><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"ArticleBody-extraData\"><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"xyz-data\">Alibaba is back in the spotlight \u2014 with U.S.-traded shares soaring nearly 70% so far in 2025 \u2014 as a favored play on Chinese artificial intelligence. The company said Thursday its AI-related product revenue grew by triple digits for a sixth-straight quarter in the period ended December. Its Qwen AI model has proven itself a capable rival to DeepSeek , along with winning a deal for iPhones sold in China . Founder Jack Ma, once politically sidelined, made his latest public reappearance on Feb. 17 \u2014 with a front-row seat at a rare meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping held with entrepreneurs , including DeepSeek&#8217;s Liang Wenfeng. Several analysts think Alibaba&#8217;s gains will continue, with Jefferies setting a $156 price target as of Feb. 20. That&#8217;s upside of more than 8% from Friday&#8217;s close of $143.75. UBS equity strategists on Thursday said they have switched out PDD for Alibaba in a model portfolio &#8220;given its exposure to AI and quant factors.&#8221; Remember how just several months ago the Temu parent had a larger market cap , raising concerns that Alibaba was struggling to compete on its core e-commerce business? Taobao and Tmall Group saw sales rise 5% in the latest quarter. As excited as many investors are about AI opportunities in China, crowding into related stocks has only picked up by 0.02 so far this year on UBS&#8217;s scoring system. That&#8217;s far below the increase of 0.2 in the crowding score for U.S. AI-related names over the last two years, UBS said. Alibaba had the highest crowding score among large Chinese internet technology names, the report said. &#8220;Our Quants team&#8217;s analysis previously suggested that stocks with reasonable but improving crowding have seen the most near-term outperformance.&#8221; Hong Kong&#8217;s Hang Seng index hit a three-year high Friday with China Unicom, Lenovo and Alibaba&#8217;s locally traded shares leading gains. &#8220;Should investors rotate from Alibaba to the AI trade laggers (i.e. Tencent and Baidu)? Not for now,&#8221; JPMorgan internet analyst Alex Yao wrote in a Feb. 17 note. &#8220;We think both Tencent and Baidu&#8217;s share prices could be driven by AI development in different ways with different risks.&#8221; U.S.-listed shares of Baidu are up by about 8% for the year so far, despite the company sharing on Feb. 18 that its AI Cloud revenue rose 26% year-on-year to 7.1 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. Hong Kong-traded shares of Tencent , which has yet to report earnings for the period, have risen by about 24% for the year so far. JPMorgan is neutral on Baidu, but overweight on Tencent and Alibaba. The firm has a price target of $125 on Alibaba shares, suggesting a 13% decline from Friday&#8217;s close. At least four other major investment firms have a buy rating on Alibaba. But Morgan Stanley is notably more cautious with an equal-weight rating and a price target of $100. That would imply a drop of 30% from Friday&#8217;s close. The firm pointed out that Alibaba&#8217;s capital expenditures were 11% of revenue in the latest quarter, versus 3% in the prior quarter \u2014 a potential weight on future margins that management warned about. Morgan Stanley also highlighted risks such as weaker consumption and a slower pace of enterprise digitalization. \u2014 CNBC&#8217;s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.<\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"HighlightShare-hidden\" style=\"top:0;left:0\"><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2025\/02\/23\/alibaba-rose-on-china-ai-hopes-where-analysts-see-the-stock-heading.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alibaba is back in the spotlight \u2014 with U.S.-traded shares soaring nearly 70% so far in 2025 \u2014 as a favored play on Chinese artificial intelligence. The company said Thursday its AI-related product revenue grew by triple digits for a sixth-straight quarter in the period ended December. Its Qwen AI model has proven itself a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[2413,1632,700,2091,2029,4352,222],"class_list":{"0":"post-10693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-finance-news","8":"tag-alibaba","9":"tag-analysts","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-heading","12":"tag-hopes","13":"tag-rose","14":"tag-stock"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}