Alibaba Group Stock In Focus As Its AI Search Engine Reaches Milestone: Retail’s Bullish

ADR shares of Alibaba Group Holding ($BABA) were in the spotlight as the company’s international commerce division announced a customer milestone for its artificial intelligence search engine just two months into its launch, lifting retail sentiment.

Alibaba International, the international commerce division of Alibaba Group Holdings said Accio, had acquired over 500,000 small and medium-sized customers since launching in November.

Accio helps merchants with online sourcing with catalogs of millions of suppliers worldwide. The engine has over 7,600 product categories and boasts about 200 million trade industry-specific parameters, Alibaba said in a statement.

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits was ‘bullish’ on Monday compared to ‘neutral’ a day ago. Message volumes remained in the ‘low’ zone.

BABA sentiment meter and message volumes on Jan 6 as of 5:45 am ET

The company statement added the tool saw more than 50,000 SMEs deploy the tool during the peak global e-commerce sales seasons in November and December for Black Friday and Christmas inventory stocking.

Alibaba is banking on Accio to serve B2B global trade, targeting both SMEs and large corporations, helping them sort through the “sea of available information.”

Recently, Alibaba said it had agreed to sell its 78.7% stake in Chinese hypermarket operator Sun Art Retail for $1.7 billion to Chinese private equity firm DCP Partners. The move, part of the company’s strategy to reduce its physical retail footprint, also aims to boost its e-commerce business. Alibaba had bought the controlling stake for $3.6 billion five years ago.

Alibaba’s cloud computing unit is also reportedly seeking to slash prices on its AI products.

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