Jack Ma is praising Alibaba. Wall Street is more cautious

Published Sun, Apr 14 20247:24 AM EDT

Evelyn Cheng @in/evelyn-cheng-53b23624 @chengevelyn

Alibaba shares got a boost last week from news founder Jack Ma is pleased with the company's turnaround so far. That's after co-founder and current Chair Joe Tsai told CNBC in late February he felt a lot more "confident" about Alibaba's ability to still be a top e-commerce player. Ma stepped down as chairman in 2019 . Wall Street analysts expect business will grow, but last week several trimmed their price targets on the stock. Their shared concern is how much Alibaba is spending in the near term for future growth. JPMorgan lowered its earnings forecasts based on "Alibaba's increasing commitment to investments in core operations: domestic/international ecommerce and cloud," China Internet Analyst Alex Yao and a team said in a report on April 9. They cut their price target to $100 a share, down from $105 previously, while maintaining an overweight rating. The new price target is still about 33% above where Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares closed Thursday. The stock has tumbled over a rocky period of about 12 months in which the company shook up its management with a restructuring into six units aimed at spin-offs — "to unlock shareholder value." One by one, the company has cancelled plans for the IPO of its cloud business, and then its logistics arm Cainiao . "The first thing we did was to acknowledge mistakes," Tsai told Norges Bank Investment Management's CEO Nicolai Tangen in an interview, according to a video published on April 3. The firm says it owns 2% of Alibaba. "We've acknowledged in the past we might have not focused on our [shopping app] user experience," Tsai said. "The second thing is to reorganize our personnel, change the organizational structure that fits the strategy." Eddie Wu became CEO of Alibaba in September, and is also acting head of the cloud business. He succeeded Trudy Dai as head of the Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business in December. Daniel Zhang, the former CEO of the company, abruptly left instead of staying on to lead cloud as originally planned. "Near term, BABA's financial metrics should remain weak over the next few quarters, given its sustained user investment in Taobao Tmall and [Alibaba International Digital Commerce] investment," UBS analyst Kenneth Fong and a team said in a report on April 9. "More meaningful upside is likely to be in 2H if macro recovery builds momentum and with more concrete financial results demonstrated from the new business strategy," UBS said. They cut their price target by $1 to $105 a share and maintained their buy rating. Competition remains fierce across Alibaba's major business lines. PDD Holdings' Pinduoduo app and ByteDance's Douyin, the local version of TikTok, have emerged as two major competitors to Alibaba in e-commerce. The company had spearheaded the industry's rapid growth in China with its Taobao and Tmall platforms. In the relatively new realm of generative artificial intelligence, ByteDance Doubao chatbot is more popular than Alibaba's, according to Nomura, citing Questmobile data. Doubao had around 3.7 million users as of the end of March, more than twice that of Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot, the data showed. Baidu's Ernie bot was in second place, with around 2.5 million daily active users. By average daily time spent, Doubao remains first at 8.4 minutes, but Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen is second at 7.7 minutes as of the end of March, according to the data. Alibaba is also integrating AI tools and models with its e-commerce and cloud businesses. However, in Tsai's interview with Norges Bank Investment Management, the Alibaba executive said he estimated that China was about two years behind the U.S. in terms of AI development. AI monetization also got little to no mention in six analyst reports published last week on Alibaba. "We maintain our conservative view towards BABA as business transformation is likely to take time," Morgan Stanley equity analyst Gary Yu and a team said in a note on April 10. They have a price target of $85, and, in contrast to the many buy ratings, rate the stock equal weight. — CNBC's Michael Bloom and Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.