Alibaba (BABA) Soars 6.51% on AI-Driven Cloud Growth

On April 9, 2025, Baba surged 6.51% in pre-market trading, reflecting a significant boost in investor confidence and market sentiment.

Alibaba Cloud's new platform, Baolian, has launched the industry's first full lifecycle MCP service, eliminating the need for users to manage resources, develop deployments, and handle engineering operations. This service allows users to quickly set up an MCP service-connected Agent in just five minutes. The platform initially supports over 50 services from Alibaba Group and third-party providers, covering areas such as life information, browsers, information processing, and content generation, meeting various Agent application development needs.

Analysts from major financial institutions have reaffirmed their positive outlook on Alibaba. McGregor reiterated its "buy" rating for Alibaba, raising its target price for H shares to 176.3 Hong Kong dollars. The firm expects stable performance for the fourth fiscal quarter ending March 31, with core businesses showing sequential improvement. Enhanced advertising technology is anticipated to sustainably increase commercialization rates. Citigroup also maintained its "buy" rating, predicting steady customer management revenue (CMR) performance for the fourth quarter, driven by increased service fees and higher site-wide push penetration rates. This is expected to boost monetization rates and continue the growth momentum of CMR. Additionally, cloud business revenue growth is projected to accelerate.

Morgan Stanley has kept its "overweight" rating for Alibaba, with a target price of 180 dollars. The firm remains optimistic about Alibaba as a major beneficiary of AI, predicting that the company's fourth-quarter CMR growth will outpace the growth in goods transaction volume, with cloud revenue accelerating to 18%.