Alibaba bets on overseas e-commerce unit amid sluggish growth in China

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group is betting on its overseas businesses while domestic consumption growth remains sluggish.

One bright spot in Alibaba's latest earnings report was its international e-commerce business unit, which posted revenue of 28.5 billion Chinese yuan ($4 billion) in the December quarter, up 44% from a year ago. Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group includes platforms like AliExpress, Lazada, Daraz and Trendyol.

"The strong performance was driven by solid growth across all of AIDC's retail platforms, especially from the crossborder AliExpress Choice business," the company said.

Meanwhile, revenue from the company's core e-commerce businesses Taobao and Tmall Group was $18.1 billion, growing only 2% year-over-year.

"We will step up investment to improve users' core experiences to drive growth in Taobao and Tmall Group and strengthen market leadership in the coming year. We will also focus our resources on developing public cloud products and sustaining the strong growth momentum in international commerce business," Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said earlier this month.

Despite AIDC's strong sales growth, losses also surged year-over-year mostly from "increased investment in businesses, including AliExpress' Choice and Trendyol's international business, partly offset by improvements in monetization."

The quarterly results follow a series of management shuffles at Alibaba and its subunits. Pakistan e-commerce platform Daraz replaced its CEO Bjarke Mikkelsen on Jan. 24. James Dong, CEO of Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Lazada Group, was named as Daraz's acting CEO. The company said he would "work on a deeper integration between Daraz and our sister companies."

In early January, Lazada executed a mass