Source: Wall Street News Author: Li Dan
Citron said that Ali's stock price is expected to rise above 100 US dollars, which is equivalent to at least a 24% increase from Wednesday's closing. Referring to Ali's AI cloud prospects and strategic investments, it said that Tongyi Qianwen is China's leading big model. Ali's earnings report for Tuesday showed a three-digit year-on-year increase in smart cloud AI revenue in the first quarter.
After being strongly favored by Citron Research (Citron Research), an agency famous for doing aerial stock listings in the past,$Alibaba (BABA.US)$US stocks surged more than 7% overnight, hitting a new closing high since November 15, 2023. After the opening of the Hong Kong stock market today,$BABA-SW (09988.HK)$There was also a strong rise, and the stock price rose by more than 7%.
Wall Street News noticed that before Ali's stock price began to soar in early trading, Citron posted more songs about Ali on social media.
Citron said that Alibaba is gaining momentum, and its stock price is expected to rise above $100. It will follow the success of Microsoft and Amazon in China, and investors will recognize Ali's artificial intelligence (AI) cloud prospects and strategic investments. Citron also pointed out that in the field of big language models (LLM) in China, Ali's model is a leader.
If Citron's predictions are correct, Ali's stock price will break through the $100 mark for the first time since July 2023, rising at least 24% from the close of this Wednesday.
Some netizens agreed in response below the Citron post, saying that Alibaba and Baidu are both seriously undervalued and that they should buy about the two. Some netizens suggested that Citron be studied in depth on Pinduoduo. They think Citron should also like this one. Other netizens think that Citron, which has been washing hands for more than three years, is out of stock.
Before announcing the cessation of shorting research at the end of January 2021, Citron, founded in 2001, had been focusing on research on shorting for 20 years, and is one of the most influential shorting agencies in the US. According to media statistics, since 2006, Citron has shorted more than 20 Chinese companies including New Oriental, China Biotech, Qihoo 360, and China Evergrande. In 2011, after Citron released its short selling report, it forced Southeast Rongtong to be delisted within four months.
Coincidentally, the day before Citron was posted, Scion Asset Management, a hedge fund owned by Michael Burry, the prototype of the movie “The Big Short,” just revealed this Wednesday that it increased its Alibaba holdings by 50,000 shares in the first quarter of this year. However, Ali is not yet Scion's biggest shareholding. In the first quarter, the fund's holdings of another Chinese securities company, JD surpassed Ali and became the fund's top stock, with Ali in second place.
On the day before Scion disclosed its holdings, the financial report for the first quarter and fourth fiscal quarter of this year already showed the strong growth of Alibaba AI Cloud. Alibaba Cloud's total revenue for the quarter increased 3% year-on-year to 25.595 billion yuan. Among them, revenue from core public cloud products achieved double-digit growth and AI-related cloud products achieved three-digit growth. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud continued to maintain profit, and adjusted EBITA profit increased 45% year over year to 1,432 billion yuan.
At the performance conference call after the financial report, an Ali executive said that at present, cloud business revenue growth is mainly driven by new AI products. These AI products themselves have not only brought in new revenue, but have also boosted sales of traditional cloud computing products, particularly in the public cloud sector. Revenue from some proprietary cloud projects is declining, which has had a certain impact on overall revenue, but revenue growth from public clouds and AI-related products has shown a double-digit increase this quarter.
Alibaba's management believes that under the company's strong AI layout, Alibaba Cloud's commercial revenue will resume double-digit growth in the second half of the fiscal year.
Wall Street News later mentioned that while providing cloud computing services to large model customers, Alibaba Cloud is also developing its own big open source model, but this is not to seize the customer market, but to help the industry grow faster through Alibaba Cloud's open source technology.
Up to now, Ali's generalized big model has been iterated to version 2.5. Recently, the latest evaluation results released by an authority show that the performance of Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 launched by Alibaba Cloud in Chinese is on par with GPT-4 Turbo.
The release of the Tongyi model is, on the one hand, to establish the company's AI ecosystem (using an open source form) to help the industry develop faster, expand the market, and increase demand for AI cloud computing power; on the other hand, it is also to promote the development of AI applications. Based on this big model, developers can quickly build AI applications suitable for different scenarios, increase the growth of users within the group and the C-side, thereby increasing the demand for cloud computing power services. The rapid development of both can quickly drive the growth of Alibaba Cloud's business.
edit/lambor