Analysts fear Alibaba may also be facing e-commerce user saturation. The increase of active buyers, or customers who buy at least one product a year, was the slowest in three-and-a-half years – up just 5% from the previous quarter to 350m.
Mobile sales eclipsed desktop sales for the first time to account for 51% of total revenue, up from 42% in the previous quarter.
Ma, an English teacher-turned businessman who twice failed his university entrance exams, founded Alibaba in a cramped one-bedroom flat in China 15 years ago.
“We have a dream,” Ma said as he rang the opening bell to officially launch the flotation on the NYSE last year. “We hope in the next 15 years the world changes because of us. We hope in 15 years people say this is a company like Microsoft, IBM, Walmart. They changed, shaped the world … We want to be bigger than Walmart.”