Topic: A Decline or a Revival? Can Ali Revive in Metaverse? (Read 54 times)

$25 billion in repurchase, is it a decline or a revival? Can Alibaba (Ali) be the king again in the map of the metaverse?

Foreword: Ali's large-scale repurchase, a last resort or a move with hidden tricks? This article wil start with Ali's domestic operation and analyze Ali?s possible future direction and source of Ali's confidence in future sustainable growth.

On March 22, Alibaba announced in a Hong Kong stock announcement that the previously announced share repurchase scale has increased from US$15 billion to US$25 billion, and the repurchase plan was valid for two years until the end of March 2024. So far, Ali?s largest repurchase scale has been close to one-tenth of its market value, which not only sets the largest scale of Chinese companies? repurchase of their own shares, but also sets a new record for the scale of Chinese concept stock repurchase.
As early as 2020, Alibaba started a repurchase plan, but even if the scale of the repurchase continued to expand, Alibaba's share price is always on a downward trend. By March 15 in 2022, the share price dropped to a minimum of HK$71 per share and the rate of decline during the period was staggering.
Such a long-term slump in the stock price has naturally made shareholders complain, and with this unprecedented scale of repurchase, it is likely to remind people that: Alibaba is in trouble, the continuous decrease in the stock price triggers the exit of shareholders and Ali's decline is a foregone conclusion.
Analyzing the current operation layout of Ali in China can naturally lead to such a concern. We can also try to analyze it from several aspects:
1.E-commerce
In recent years, the battle between Taobao and Pinduoduo has been quite eye-catching. Pinduoduo?s 2021 annual report showed that by the end of 2021, Pinduoduo had owned 868.7 million users which are active for many years, accounting for 86% of China?s netizens, with a GMV of more than 2.4 trillion, which seemed to have surpassed Taobao and become the top e-commerce giant.
2.The financial field
The failure of Ant Financial's listing made a financing opportunity that could have made up for the loss declared to fail, making the situation of the already tight capital chain even worse.
3.The logistics field
Relying on the transaction volume of Taobao and Tmall, Cainiao is not short of orders, but with the strong development of SF Express and JD.com and the impact of the continuous low price of Jitu, the pressure of Cainiao is increasing day by day. Now that JD.com acquired Debon for 8.9 billion, Cainiao?s situation get even worse... Not to mention that due to the government policies in the past two years, Ali had suffered from fines, layoffs and revenue reduction, all of which resulted in the fact that Ali?s stock price continues to fall.
Then dose Ali only have to take the $25 billion repurchase as a last resort for or still have  back-up moves?
Perhaps, as stated in the Hong Kong stock announcement, Ali is "confident in the company's continued growth in the future".
$25 billion! Future! Confidence! If you have followed the Two Sessions in China that have just passed, you may remember that the suggestions and remarks issued by many in the Two Sessions all mentioned a message - The metaverse is the future.

Coincidentally, the market value of those related to metaverse, which is the symbol of the future, in the first quarter of 2022 was floating around $25 billion. According to the latest data from coinmarketcap, the total market value of metaverse-related crypto assets is $22.51 billion.
From this, it can be seen that, whether in terms of market potential, development direction or confidence in the layout, Ali is still the Ali in 1999 when it was first established, with a long-term layout and a unique vision.
People may wonder, is this really the truth? Ali is making more investment in metaverse and rearrange its main business?
Alibaba's investment directly linked to the metaverse field can be traced back to 2016 when Alibaba has successively participated in the C round and D round of the AR unicorn Magical Leap and the C round was led by Alibaba Group, with an investment amount of US$793.5 million.
In 2021, the Alibaba's layout stretched more over Metaverse with the establishment of Hangzhou Shudian Technology Co., Ltd. (deployed VR equipment hardware and XR laboratory, focusing on 3D modeling and holographic technology research and development), Yuanjing Shengsheng (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. (mainly software development, computer system services, performance brokers, Internet information, etc.).
In September 2021, Alibaba Cloud heterogeneous computing product expert Zhang Xintao said that for enterprise-level applications of the Metaverse, Alibaba Cloud provided a complete set of visual computing solutions from rendering, streaming to encoding. Among them, as the largest GPU cluster in Asia, self-developed coding technology and video enhancement technology are the unique advantages of Alibaba Cloud.
At present, Alibaba has applied for registration of a number of trademarks such as "Alibaba Metaverse", "Taobao Metaverse", "Dingding Metaverse", "METAMEETING", "METALEARNING" and "Metaverse DINGTALK".
The latest news on March 25 showed that Ali Auction has launched a large number of third-party public chains and digital collection stores supported by the platform in a prominent place of the main page of Taobao APP for users to conduct auction transactions. In addition to the digital collections supported by the public chain Conflux, Ali Auction also had digital collections supported by the domestic alliance chain "Knowledge Chain" and "New Edition Chain".
Moreover, according to Xinzhibang Metaverse, WhaleTalk, the NFT collection platform created by Ali Ant Ku?ai, ranked first in the domestic digital collection platform list. NFT is known as a digital collection in China and is an indispensable token in the Metaverse. Thus Alibaba's advantages and ambitions in the layout of the Metaverse are fairly evident.
Of course, the domestic NFT digital collection platforms in China include not only Ali's WhaleTalk, but also Tencent's Magic Core, etc.
Then how big will China's NFT digital collection market be, which has attracted many major groups to deploy in it?
In addition, can an NFT (or a namely the digital collection) of just a JPEG image be the entrance ticket to the metaverse?
We will discuss it with you in the next article.