What's Going On With Alibaba Stock Friday?

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA stock is trading lower Friday amid reports of the company reshaping its cloud business and canceling its annual December 12 shopping festival, known as 12.12, on its online platforms Taobao and Tmall. 

Instead, the online platforms plan to organize a different event titled 'year-end good price' in December, Reuters reports.

Also Read: Alibaba Shows Resilience In E-commerce, Analyst Highlights Signs Of Market Stabilization In China

In recent years, Singles Day, traditionally on November 11, has expanded into a multi-week event starting in late October. The report cited data provider Syntun estimate that gross merchandising volume (GMV) sales across major e-commerce platforms increased by 2.08% to 1.14 trillion yuan ($156.40 billion) this year, compared to a 2.9% growth last year.

During Singles Day, as per the report, Alibaba offered 80 million products at their lowest prices of the year to compete with rivals like Douyin and PDD Holdings Inc's PDD Pinduoduo.

Meanwhile, Alibaba's cloud business restructuring started with a leadership overhaul to boost growth and capitalize on the AI surge after it dumped the spinoff of its $11 billion cloud unit. The company has appointed three new executives to lead critical divisions within Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. Liu Weiguang will head the public cloud segment, focusing on domestic enterprise customers in China to regain market share lost to state-backed competitors, Bloomberg reports.

This reorganization also addresses management instability that began with the departure of former president Jeff Zhang in 2022. Alibaba Cloud has been without a permanent CEO since then, with interim leadership changes.

Alongside Liu, two other senior managers will oversee the hybrid cloud services and cloud infrastructure divisions. These veterans will divide the majority of the Chinese market's responsibilities. The cloud division is central to Alibaba's AI initiatives.

Price Action: BABA shares traded lower by 0.57% at $78.51 premarket on the last check Friday.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.