Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group is a group of companies based in Hangzhou, China. In the company's own account, it was established in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou. Its holding company is a Cayman Islands company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Joe Tsai is Chairman and Eddie Wu is Chief Executive Officer. Its annual report on Form 20-F gives 131,462 full-time employees as of 31 March 2026.

Listings and ownership

The points at which its capital structure changed, from the annual report and company disclosures:

As of 31 March 2026 Junhan held about 32% of Ant Group, Junao about 22% and Alibaba 33%. Alipay is Ant Group's business; it is not a consolidated subsidiary of Alibaba.

How big the businesses are — fiscal 2026

Revenue for the year ended March 2026 was CNY1,023.7 billion, up 3%. Excluding the Sun Art supermarket and Intime department-store businesses sold the year before, the company says like-for-like revenue grew 11%. Income from operations fell 64% to CNY50.2 billion and net income fell 19% to CNY102.1 billion. The results release attributes the drop to investment in quick commerce, user experiences and technology.

Cloud is the clear grower; the fall in "all others" is mainly the retail businesses that were sold. CEO Eddie Wu said that in the January–March 2026 quarter the cloud group's external revenue growth accelerated to 40%, with AI-related products accounting for 30% of it.

Actions by Chinese and US authorities

Measures aimed at Alibaba and its affiliates, by the body that took them:

According to CNBC, Ant Group had been set to raise just under US$34.5 billion, and the day before the suspension the China Securities Regulatory Commission summoned Jack Ma and others for an interview. On the fine, Alibaba said: "We accept the penalty with sincerity and will ensure our compliance with determination." A 1260H designation does not by itself bar transactions, but the law firm WilmerHale notes that Pentagon procurement restrictions are increasingly tied to the list.

The six-way split, and after

On 28 March 2023 Alibaba announced it would divide into six business groups, each with its own CEO and board: cloud, Taobao Tmall, local services, Cainiao logistics, global digital commerce, and digital media and entertainment. Daniel Zhang, then CEO, told staff by email that each group could pursue independent fundraising and IPOs when ready.

The plan was revised within the year. On 16 November 2023 Alibaba said it would not proceed with a full spin-off of the cloud group, citing expanded US export restrictions on advanced chips. Its fiscal 2026 results describe Ele.me (food delivery) and Fliggy (travel) as folded into the China e-commerce group.

Qwen — releasing its own models

Alibaba Cloud introduced its large language model Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 and in August of that year released two smaller versions, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, for public use. TechNode reported that this made it the first of China's big tech companies to open-source its large language models. It has kept releasing Qwen models since; in February 2026 it opened Qwen3.5-397B-A17B as the first model of Qwen3.5. In the same month, the company says, the consumer Qwen app passed 300 million monthly active users across all platforms.

On this site Qwen appears in the DeepSeek-R1 article: when DeepSeek distilled R1 into smaller models, Qwen was one of the bases it used.

Alibaba on this site

Alibaba's history is that of an e-commerce company growing outward into finance (Ant Group), logistics (Cainiao) and cloud, and meeting a different regulator at each step. The listing halt came from a stock exchange, the fine from the market regulator, and the shelved cloud spin-off from US export controls: a different lever for each layer.