By Yifan Wang
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares soared in Hong Kong trading on Friday, extending the positive momentum from U.S. trading overnight as investors welcomed the company’s better-than-expected earnings.
Shares of the Chinese e-commerce giant jumped as much as 14% in Hong Kong to 92.40 Hong Kong dollars (US$ 11.77), after its American depository receipts closed 15% higher on Thursday.
The gains came after Alibaba posted earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter, which proved more resilient than the market had feared.
The company’s revenue rose 9% from a year earlier to 204.1 billion yuan, or US$ 32.2 billion, based on an exchange rate of CNY6.34 to a dollar that Alibaba used. Net loss widened to CNY16.2 billion from CNY5.5 billion a year earlier. Alibaba attributed the wider loss to price drops in its equity investments in publicly traded companies.
While the top-line growth marked Alibaba’s slowest revenue increase for the second straight quarter since it went public in 2014, both revenue and net loss figures beat expectations of analysts polled by FactSet.
Write to Yifan Wang at yifan.wang@wsj.com