The Chinese e-commerce and technology giant ended December with 128,197 employees, down from 194,320 a year earlier.<\/p>\n
The disclosure of its latest headcount came in an earnings report released Thursday that showed the firm’s profit plunging 67% and its revenue missing expectations for the last three months of last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The company’s shares in Hong Kong were trading down 6% Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The bulk of Alibaba’s workforce reduction was revealed in its March 2025 quarter following the sale of Sun Art <\/a>retail group at the end of 2024. The tech giant also exited its stake in\u00a0department store chain Intime<\/a> around the same period.<\/p>\n China’s second-largest tech company by market cap is amongst a raft of other major tech firms that have reduced headcounts in the past year from Silicon Valley to Hangzhou, China.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alibaba’s staff has supported its sprawling network of business units spanning e-commerce, cloud, logistics, and other related services.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, Alibaba has been steadily reducing headcount in recent years, though the latest cuts were much larger than the 11% reduction in December 2024 from the prior year.<\/p>\n This comes as Alibaba has sought to offload labor-intensive holdings and restructure its core businesses, with a major focus on artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n The tech giant aims to become a full-stack AI company spanning semiconductor manufacturing to computing and AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company this week launched an agentic AI service known as Wukong<\/a> for businesses, and hiked prices for its cloud and storage services by as much as 34% due to rising demand and supply chain costs.<\/p>\n Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said during an earnings call Thursday that the company aimed to grow its cloud and AI revenue to over $100 billion annually over the next five years. <\/p>\n