HANGZHOU: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has beaten market expectations after reporting a huge 61% rise in quarterly revenues that were driven by online shoppers.

The company announced in a statement that revenues for the three months to the end of September reached 55.12bn yuan ($8.34bn), with its core business accounting for 46.46bn yuan ($6.98bn) of the total.

“We had an outstanding quarter. Our consumer insights and technology innovation were the key drivers behind our customer value proposition across the Alibaba economy,” said Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group.

“We are seeing the early results from our efforts to integrate online and offline with our New Retail strategy, and consumers have benefited from access to high quality products, improved customer experience and the tremendous convenience of shopping anytime, anywhere,” he added.

Alibaba, which was founded just 18 years ago by former English teacher Jack Ma, dominates Chinese e-commerce with its online marketplaces Tmall and Taobao, and there are few signs of them slowing down.

According to its statement, the company’s retail marketplaces now reach 488m annual active consumers while their base of mobile monthly active users increased to 549m in September, up 20m from three months ago.

Also of note is the extent to which Alibaba’s move into other commercial activities, such as cloud computing, is paying off.

Revenue from cloud computing doubled year-on-year to 2.9bn yuan ($447m) while revenue from digital media and entertainment increased 33% over the year to 4.8bn yuan ($721m).

And looking at digital media and entertainment in more detail, Alibaba reported that daily subscribers to its Youku video service increased more than 180% year-on-year in the third quarter.

In comments that lay down a challenge to other video content providers, the company said: “We believe a strong content pipeline, especially with a focus on original content, offering greater flexibility around availability and distribution, will bring us sustainable long-term advantages in video entertainment.”

Sourced from Alibaba; additional content by WARC staff