Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) stock rose on Friday following reports of China's trade surplus hitting a record high in June.
Surging exports outpaced a surprise drop in imports, potentially escalating trade tensions.
Exports reached $308 billion, marking the third consecutive month of growth and the highest level in nearly two years, while imports fell to $209 billion, resulting in a $99 billion surplus, Bloomberg reports.
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This growing imbalance has alarmed China's trade partners, leading to increased tariffs on Chinese imports, including electric vehicles.
Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist of Pinpoint Asset Management, told Bloomberg that the surplus indicates China's weak domestic demand and strong export-dependent production capacity.
Meanwhile, Alibaba has more reasons to rejoice, especially as it became a leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) developer.
One of its Qwen models has outperformed domestic competitors to secure the third spot globally, following only Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The Qwen2-72B-Instruct, the most advanced version of Alibaba's Qwen family of large language models (LLMs), ranked just behind OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, SCMP cites SuperClue, a benchmarking platform.
Just weeks ago, Qwen2-72B topped the ranking of open-source models on Hugging Face, a machine-learning developer platform, with three Qwen models making the top 10.
Price Action: BABA shares traded higher by 2.20% at $80.25 premarket at the last check on Friday.
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