Alibaba feels a pinch from China's slow economic growth
This year? He plans to spend less than half of this amount, on Zara's jeans, two shirts for work and a bottle of moisturizer.
The other dark cloud that swings over the Chinese economy has driven from abroad.
The quarter ended September was the first since the Trump administration began its trade war with China. Alibaba leaders have sought to reassure investors by pointing out that while import duties make US goods more expensive, Chinese customers can still use Alibaba platforms to buy more products made at home or in other countries.
But the impact of tariffs has just begun to be felt over China's $ 12 trillion economy. Factory activity is slowing, which can eventually lead to job losses and a decline in retail costs. Washington and Beijing appear to be due to a protracted conflict, one where disagreement about trade seems inseparable from broader issues involving geopolitical and technological dominance.
For Alibaba, the timing is untenable.
Investors have already sold shares in technology companies on both sides of the Pacific this year. The Alibaba share, trading in the US, has lost about 30 percent of its value since June. Other major Chinese internet companies have gone even worse, as fear spread over a frosting regulatory environment for the country's most vibrant businesses.
Alibaba has long had an unbeatable grip on how Chinese consumers trade on phones and computers. In the past, the company has said that the future is dependent on expanding its consumer empire to the wider nondigital world.
The company now has nearly 80 of its sumptuous Hema supermarkets, up from 20 a year ago. Alibaba's Logistics Army Cainiao recently opened what is called "the largest robot magazine in China", where 700 boxy wheelers round rearranges giant shelves loaded with goods.
The expansion of offline operations has helped increase Alibaba's sales growth. Revenues from retail experiments like Hema jumped 151 percent in the last quarter of the year before. Sales in the company's cloud computing division, market leader in China, increased 90 percent.
But spending on developing new ventures has pushed the company's bottom line. On Friday it was asked if the more pessimistic prospect of this year could lead to Alibaba's return to such projects, said Wu, CFO, that the company did not evaluate them on its economic return, but with other calculations, such as the number of users they attract.