Welcome to this week’s News Roundup!

This week, In Q2, Alibaba demonstrated resilience and innovation, with steady user growth surpassing 1.4 billion globally and robust performance in cloud services, driven by its “User First, AI-Driven” strategy.

The weeks-long 11.11 Shopping Festival showcased evolving consumer trends, emphasizing value, personalization, and sustainability.

Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud continues to lead in AI development, unveiling new Qwen2.5-Coder models that revolutionize coding efficiency and accessibility. Dive in to explore how Alibaba is shaping the future of commerce, technology, and innovation!

Alibaba Q2 Earnings: Steady User Growth and Accelerated Cloud Expansion

Alibaba’s Q2 earnings report revealed steady growth across key business segments, underpinned by an expanding user base and continued momentum in cloud services.

Guided by “user-first” strategy, the company reported steady performance in e-commerce, with the user base saw a marked increase, with more than 1.4 billion annual active consumers globally. This was a result of Alibaba’s continued focus on personalized, user-centric services that attract and retain consumers, even in a competitive e-commerce environment.

In the cloud segment, Alibaba Cloud delivered robust results, with double-digit growth in public cloud services. The company’s integrated “Cloud + AI” strategy is progressing, with AI-related products seeing triple-digit growth for the fifth consecutive quarter. This positions Alibaba Cloud as a leading player in the AI space in China. The strong performance was bolstered by the launch of new AI products and technologies at the 16th Apsara Conference, further cementing Alibaba’s position at the forefront of AI era.

Eddie Wu, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba, highlighted the company’s resilience in adapting to macroeconomic conditions, emphasizing that Alibaba remains focused on long-term value creation. Despite a challenging economic environment, the company’s strategy to enhance user engagement, expand its technological infrastructure, and deepen its investment in core markets and products drives sustained growth. Looking ahead, Alibaba remains optimistic about the future, with a solid commitment to innovation and further expansion in cloud computing and AI technologies, setting the stage for continued progress.

Discover more about this quarter’s earnings

11.11: Redefining Value, Innovation, and Sustainability in E-Commerce

This year’s 11.11 Shopping Festival, a hallmark of Chinese e-commerce, highlighted evolving consumer trends and innovations in the retail ecosystem.

Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba’s flagship platforms, showcased a robust performance driven by value-for-money products and personalized experiences. One notable trend was the rise of “good value” consumption, with shoppers prioritizing quality at reasonable prices. A robust logistics network ensured swift delivery, reinforcing consumer trust. Additionally, the growing popularity of live-streaming commerce continued to shape purchasing behaviors, with a broader array of sellers engaging buyers in real-time.

Key takeaways from the festival included a commitment to empowering smaller businesses, with Alibaba providing tools and resources to amplify their visibility and operational efficiency. Technology also played a pivotal role, with AI-driven recommendations and digital tools enabling merchants to cater to personalized demands effectively.

Overall, this year’s 11.11 underscored the importance of agility and innovation in the e-commerce landscape. By blending affordability, technology, and sustainability, Alibaba demonstrated its ability to adapt to shifting consumer expectations while fostering an inclusive and dynamic marketplace.

More details on the Alizila 11.11 series

• Emotional Shopping: Tmall 11.11 Unveils Shifting Consumer Trends
• Four Takeaways from Taobao and Tmall’s 11.11 Shopping Festival in 2024
• LIVE BLOG：Alibaba’s 2024 11.11 Global Shopping Festival

Alibaba Cloud Expands Open-Source Qwen2.5-Coder Series with New Model Sizes

Alibaba Cloud has expanded its Qwen2.5-Coder series by open-sourcing additional model sizes, including 0.5B, 3B, 14B, and 32B. These new additions complement the previously released 1.5B and 7B models introduced in September. The comprehensive spectrum of model sizes is designed to address the diverse needs of developers, enabling them to explore a wide array of application scenarios, such as code assistants and creative visual tools. With built-in capabilities, these models empower even beginners to build websites, create data visualizations, design resumes, and develop games using natural language inputs.

In just two days since their debut, the new models in Qwen2.5-Coder Series have already attracted over 250,000 downloads in the open-source community, securing top positions on leaderboards that evaluate AI coder capabilities.

The flagship model of this release, the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, has demonstrated outstanding performance across multiple popular code generation benchmarks, including EvalPlus, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench, outperforming various state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source code LLMs.

This model enhances programming efficiency by helping users indentify and fix errors in their code, while excelling across more than 40 programming languages. Its superior achievement is attributed to a unique approach to data cleaning and balancing during the pre-training phase. Beyond its robust coding capabilities, the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct also exhibits strong general reasoning,  mathematical proficiency, and alignment with human preferences.

During its annual flagship event, Apsara, in September, Alibaba Cloud released over 100 models from the Qwen 2.5 series to the global open-source community. This move underscores its ongoing commitment to democratizing access to AI tools, reducing development costs for businesses, and accelerating AI adoption worldwide. Since its initial launch in April 2023, the Qwen model series—Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary portfolio of large language models, has achieved remarkable traction with over 40 million downloads across open-source platforms.

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