Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) is set to report its fiscal third-quarter earnings results before the markets open on Thursday. The consensus estimates are calling for $2.22 in earnings per share (EPS) and $22.46 billion in revenue. The same period of last year reportedly had EPS of $1.81 on $17.06 billion in revenue.
Alibaba is the top online seller of everything in China and Asia, and the company has largely become China’s most valuable company, with a market cap of some $609 billion or so. It is also now one of the largest companies in the world. While it has been public in the United States on the New York Stock Exchange for about five years, the company entered the Hong Kong Stock Exchange recently as well, in what was the biggest IPO of 2019.
In November, the company announced record Singles Day sales of a stunning $38 billion. More than half a billion people from a number of countries participated in the event, which is China’s equivalent to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, though Singles Day is much larger. The five-day Black Friday clocked less than $25 billion in sales last year, and Cyber Monday saw less than $8 billion. Alibaba said that it had netted its first $1 billion in sales in just 68 seconds and the first $10 billion in half an hour.
Alibaba has gone beyond e-commerce and developed into a sophisticated new type of conglomerate in the cyber-era, with e-commerce as the base for the rest of the four businesses: logistics, finance, data-computing and cross-border infrastructure. Top analysts, including Raymond James, are still seeing more upside in this stock.
Here’s what a few analysts had to say about Alibaba ahead of the report:
- DZ Bank has a Buy rating with a $260 target price.
- KeyCorp rates it as Overweight with a $260 target.
- Daiwa Capital Markets has a Buy rating.
- RBC has a Buy rating and a $240 price target.
- Stifel has a Buy rating with a $220 price target.
- Macquarie has an Outperform rating.
Excluding Wednesday’s move, Alibaba stock had outperformed the broad markets with a gain of about 30% in the past 52 weeks. In just the past quarter alone, the share price was up closer to 16%.
Alibaba stock traded up about 3% to $224.06 on Thursday, in a 52-week range of $147.95 to $231.14. The consensus price target is $241.91.
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