Jack Ma-backed Ant's profit fell 31% on AI, new business costs
[BEIJING] Ant Group's quarterly profit fell 31 per cent as the firm invested in artificial intelligence and other initiatives to bolster revenue growth.
The Hangzhou-based online finance firm contributed 1.76 billion yuan (S$317.5 million) of profit to Alibaba Group Holding. Considering Alibaba's one-third stake in Ant, that translates to an estimated 5.3 billion yuan in profit for the three months ended Dec 31, according to Bloomberg calculations based on Alibaba's earnings report.
That follows a more than 50-fold surge in the previous quarter that was helped by investment gains. Ant's earnings lag a quarter behind Alibaba's. Ant declined to comment in an emailed statement.
Ant is seeking a turnaround by investing in initiatives including AI and building its own large language models. Sentiment for China's tech sector is improving, following a US tariff truce this week and President Xi Jinping's meeting with private entrepreneurs including co-founder Jack Ma in February. The Chinese billionaire has been trying to motivate staff with visits, even though Ma no longer holds any management positions at Alibaba and Ant.
In the latest breakthrough, Ant developed techniques for training AI models using Chinese-made semiconductors, which could cut costs by 20 per cent. The company used domestic chips, including from Alibaba and Huawei Technologies, to train models using the Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, achieving results similar to those from Nvidia chips. The company also set up a unit last year to focus on humanoid robot development.
Ant has been applying its AI tech on its own financial services. The company rolled out a 'life assistant' app called Zhixiaobao, which helps people order meals, hail taxis and access other functions within its mobile payments app Alipay.
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Its other new initiative Alipay Tap!, a streamlined payment process for restaurants and stores, attracted 100 million users within 11 months.
Last year, Ant enacted broad overhauls to its business, setting up independent boards for the international, database and digital technology units to pave the way for future spinoffs. The company would explore going public in Hong Kong first instead of a dual Shanghai-Hong Kong listing like it tried before it was aborted in 2020, people familiar said in 2023.
Ant has also been expanding its overseas operations to offset slowing growth at home. To fund such efforts, Ant raised US$6.5 billion in loans to refinance an offshore credit line of the same size, Bloomberg News reported in September.
Ant International operates four core businesses. Its Alipay+ connects 1.7 billion user accounts across 36 digital wallets; Antom offers payment solutions for merchants; WorldFirst enables cross-border trade payment, and Embedded Finance has an AI-powered digital lending service and helps clients with treasury and foreign exchange management.
Ant proposed buying back as much as 7.6 per cent of its shares in 2023. Under the repurchase plan, the company's valuation was trimmed to about US$79 billion – well off its peak of US$280 billion before regulators scrapped its planned initial public offering in 2020. The company was waiting for a financial holding company licence, which would help revive an IPO. BLOOMBERG
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