Hong Kong Stock Moves: Alibaba-W Rises Nearly 3% Again on Qwen 3.8 Release, Marking a Key Step in Model Competition and AI Cloud Growth

Alibaba-W (09988) climbed nearly 3% on Tuesday, trading up 2.77% to HKD 115.1 as of press time, with a turnover of HKD 4.986 billion.

On the news front, Haitong International released a research note stating that Alibaba launched Qwen 3.8-Max-Preview this month, a sparse mixture-of-experts AI model with 2.4 trillion parameters. According to user feedback, Qwen 3.8 demonstrates clear advantages in model capability, inference efficiency, and deployment costs, with significant improvements in complex reasoning, code generation, long-text processing, and AI agent applications.

Haitong believes that Qwen 3.8 is an important step for Alibaba to showcase its strength amid the recent wave of model iterations from various companies. The firm has reduced its loss forecast for the food delivery business and raised its profit margin forecast for the cloud business.

Haitong further noted that due to weaker-than-expected overall market retail growth in May and the subpar performance of the 618 shopping festival, Alibaba's core customer management revenue (CMR) is expected to show a slowing trend. However, the bank believes that market concerns over slowing Alibaba Cloud revenue and margin contraction have largely dissipated. The cloud business's profit margin will benefit from the higher average profit margins of the AI cloud business.