Alibaba Group Holding, China's largest e-commerce company, posted a 39 percent year-on-year increase in fiscal fourth-quarter revenue, the company's earnings report showed on Thursday.
The e-commerce conglomerate generated 24.2 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in revenue during the quarter, which ended on March 31, according to its financial statement.
Net profit for the quarter surged 86 percent year-on-year to 5.37 billion yuan, boosted by disposal gains on investments and businesses, the company said on Thursday.
Total gross merchandise volume, or the value of goods sold across Alibaba's platforms, reached 742 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24 percent.
The revenue increase in the quarter was also supported by a 175 percent gain in its cloud computing business, which rose to 1.07 billion yuan. Revenue generated on mobile platforms accelerated by 149 percent year-on-year to 2.02 billion yuan.
Alibaba's fourth-quarter performance lifted its U.S.-listed shares on Thursday. As of 10:23 pm Beijing time, the shares were up 3.98 percent in market trading.
"Alibaba Group ended the fiscal year 2016 with very strong performance," Zhang Yong, CEO of Alibaba Group, was quoted as saying in the statement.
He said Alibaba's mobile users, active consumers and transactions volume all continued to grow.
Alibaba's success in the quarter also demonstrated the great potential of the Chinese economy, Alibaba Chief Financial Officer Wu Wei was quoted as saying in the statement.
Retail sales have been growing fast, despite a persistent slowdown in the Chinese economy.
In the first quarter of 2016, China's retail sales exceeded 7.8 trillion yuan, increasing 10.3 percent from the same period the previous year, according to figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on April 15.
Online retail sales for the period stood at about 1.03 trillion yuan, up 27.8 percent year-on-year, the NBS said.
Zhang noted that Alibaba will continue to focus on investing in areas such as internationalization, rural expansion in China and building a world-class cloud computing business.
