Alibaba Group Holding is selling its stake in Chinese department store chain Intime for 7.4 billion yuan ($1 billion) as the company returns it focus to e-commerce, even though the sale will lead to losses of 9.3 billion yuan.
The Hangzhou-based behemoth said a consortium of buyers including Chinese billionaire Li Rucheng’s fashion conglomerate Youngor Group will acquire its 99% stake in Intime, as well as 1% owned by an unidentified minority shareholder, according to a Tuesday filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. With Yintai Group’s billionaire founder Shen Guojun, Alibaba took the department store chain private in 2017 in a $2.6 billion deal.
The e-commerce giant cofounded by billionaire Jack Ma harbored dreams of using internet technologies to upgrade brick-and-mortar retail. For example, it once wanted to generate service fees by selling customer analysis algorithms to offline retailers, and take a cut from their revenues if sales improved. It bought brick-and-mortar stores to experiment and diversify the company’s revenue streams.
That plan never lived up to expectations, and Alibaba has said it will refocus on its core e-commerce business. “Alibaba may continue to sell more assets and investors could already be expecting this,” Wang Xiaoyan, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm 86Research, says in messages sent over WeChat. “Management’s goal is now focusing on the pure internet-based business, and turning Alibaba back to an internet company.”
Wang says Alibaba may also sell RT-Mart, the hypermarket chain it acquired a controlling stake of for about $3.6 billion in 2020. The company may not have made up its mind on Freshippo, its own grocery business that was supposed to show how technology could change offline retailing.
An Alibaba spokesperson said the company has no additional comment beyond the stock exchange filing.
The e-commerce giant now hopes to revive growth by offering more value-for-money products amid China’s economic downturn, as well as using AI technologies to help merchants market them.
Its revenues grew 5% year-on-year to $33.7 billion in the three months that ended in September. Net income jumped 63% year-on-year to $6.3 billion primarily due to changes in the value of the company’s equity investments. Its dual-listed shares are up 15.1% in New York so far this year and 11.5% in Hong Kong. Cofounder Ma, who stepped down as Alibaba executive chairman in 2019, is now the country’s 8th richest billionaire with a net worth of $23.7 billion that is partially based on an Alibaba stake, according to the Forbes’s Real-Time Billionaires list.
Now led by a new management team including chief executive Eddie Wu, the company has repeatedly expressed confidence in its future. During a November analyst call, Wu was optimistic about the country’s stimulus policies and their possible impact. In early December, the Chinese leadership emphasised boosting consumption in its economic blueprint for 2025, although officials have yet to announce policy details. 86Research’s Wang says growth momentum for Alibaba should pick up next year as macro-conditions improve, with its cloud computing arm back to double-digit growth first.