Alibaba Soars on an “Outstanding Quarter”

Shares of Chinese group Alibaba were on fire in Thursday trading, after the company released its fiscal second quarter financial report and raised its outlook.

The stock surged as much as 3.1% in pre market trading after the e-commerce company reported revenue of $55.12 billion yuan (or $8.34 billion). This beat the $55.2 billion yuan forecast that analysts had been waiting for.

According to Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, “We had an outstanding quarter. We are seeing the early results from our efforts to integrate online and offline with our New Retail strategy.”

The CEO cited several recent bricks-and-mortar deals for helping the revenue growth while analyst Li Chendong of Beijing said, “There were many bright spots here, including growth in overseas business and cloud computing.” The company’s cloud computing business was 3.0 billion yuan, representing a growth of 99%.

Li also remarked, “In the future, Alibaba might take over Amazon.com Inc in market value.”

Looking ahead, the company has raised its guidance for 2018 fiscal year growth to revenue in the range of 49 to 53%. Previously Alibaba had forecast 45 to 49%.

The company is gearing up for its annual blockbuster event on November 11th called Singles’ Day. It’s similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the states, but there’s more goods than both U.S. events combined.

Shares of Alibaba have more than doubled this year so far.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) and have not been compensated for this article.