In the latest trading session, Alibaba shares fell 2.81%, marking a significantly larger decline than the modest losses recorded by major Chinese benchmark indexes. This underperformance highlights investor caution around regulatory pressures and slowing domestic consumption growth. Analysts note that the company’s core e-commerce segment grew revenue by just 4% year-over-year last quarter, its slowest pace in two years, while its cloud computing arm maintained strong momentum with 30% revenue growth but remains unprofitable on an operating basis.

Ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday period beginning Feb. 15, Alibaba plans to deploy 3 billion yuan (approximately 432 million USD) to drive user adoption of its Qwen intelligent chatbot. The campaign, set to launch Feb. 6, will offer large red-envelope–style rewards redeemable for dining, entertainment and in-app purchases, tripling the marketing budgets of domestic peers Tencent (1 billion yuan) and Baidu (500 million yuan). This aggressive spending underscores Alibaba’s strategy to leverage festive consumption patterns—when hundreds of millions travel and socialize—to entrench Qwen as the default AI assistant in China’s rapidly evolving chatbot market.