Alibaba shares received a boost last week from the news. Founder Jack Ma is pleased with the company’s turnaround so far. This after co-founder and current president Joe Tsai told CNBC in late February that he felt much more “confident” about Alibaba’s ability to still be a major player in e-commerce. But he stepped down as chairman in 2019. Wall Street analysts expect business growth, but many cut their price targets on the stock last week. Their shared concern is how much Alibaba will spend in the near term for future growth. JPMorgan lowered its earnings forecast based on Alibaba’s “increasing commitment to investing in core operations: domestic/international e-commerce and cloud,” China Internet analyst Alex Yao and a team of analysts said in an April 9 report. he. They cut their price target to $100 per share. , down from the previous $105, while maintaining an overweight rating. The new price target is still about 33% higher than Thursday’s close of U.S.-listed Alibaba shares. The stock has fallen during a difficult period of about 12 months in which the company shook up its management with a restructuring into six units aimed at spin-off – “to unlock shareholder value”. One by one, the company canceled plans to IPO its cloud business, and then its logistics arm Cainiao. “The first thing we did was recognize the mistakes,” Tsai told Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen in an interview, according to a video posted on April 3. The company claims to own 2% of Alibaba. “We recognized in the past that maybe we wouldn’t focus on ours [shopping app] “The user experience,” Tsai said. “The second thing is to reorganize our people, change the organizational structure that fits the strategy.” Eddie Wu became CEO of Alibaba in September, and is also interim head of the cloud business. He succeeded Trudy Dai as head of Taobao and Tmall’s e-commerce business in December, Daniel Zhang, the company’s former chief executive, suddenly left rather than staying on to lead the cloud as initially planned. “In the coming period, BABA’s financial metrics are expected to remain weak a few quarters, given its continued user investment in Taobao Tmall and [Alibaba International Digital Commerce] investment,” UBS analyst Kenneth Fong and a team said in an April 9 report. “More significant upside is likely to be in the second half if the macroeconomic recovery gains momentum and with more concrete financial results demonstrated by the new corporate strategy.” , UBS said. They cut their price target from $1 to $105 per share and maintained their buy rating. Competition remains fierce in Alibaba’s core business lines PDD Holdings’ Pinduoduo app and Douyin’s. ByteDance, the local version of TikTok, have emerged as two major competitors to Alibaba. The company has led the rapid growth of the industry in China with its Taobao and Tmall platforms. In the relatively new realm of generative artificial intelligence, the ByteDance chatbot Doubao is more popular than Alibaba’s, according to Nomura, citing data from Questmobile about 3.7 million users at the end of March, more than double that of Alibaba’s AI chatbot Tongyi Qianwen, according to the data, Ernie’s bot Baidu was in second place, with about 2.5 million daily active users. According to the data, in terms of average daily time spent, Dubai remains first with 8.4 minutes, but Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen is second with 7.7 minutes at the end of March. Alibaba is also integrating AI tools and models with its e-commerce and cloud businesses. However, in Tsai’s interview with Norges Bank Investment Management, the Alibaba executive said he estimated China was about two years behind the United States in terms of AI development. Monetization of AI also received little to no mention in six analyst reports released last week on Alibaba. “We maintain our conservative view on BABA as the transformation of the business will likely take time,” Morgan Stanley equity analyst Gary Yu and a team said in a note on April 10. They have a price target of $85 and, unlike many other buy ratings, rate the stock with the same weight. — CNBC’s Michael Bloom and Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.