Alibaba released the financial year 2022 (April 2021 March 2022) and the fourth quarter (January March 2022) reports, revealing the operating status of ant group in 2021 According to the financial report information, the operating profit of ant group decreased in the fourth quarter and the whole year of 2021, but the early overseas financial technology investment layout entered the harvest period, and the net income from holding investment increased. After offsetting the two phases, ant's book profit was stable, contributing an investment income of 24 billion yuan to Ali group in 2021.
An industry analyst pointed out that "with the listing of ant's early overseas investment companies, their overseas investment income will be considerable in 2021. After deducting this income, ant's annual operating profit may decline by more than 20% year-on-year." For a long time, Alibaba's financial report has become a window for the outside world to observe ant profits. In this financial report, Ali said that when the operating profit of ant group decreased year-on-year in 2021, its investment income related to ant group still increased year-on-year, mainly due to the increase in the fair value of overseas investment assets held by ant group.
Ant group's operating profit declined in 2021, which has long been followed. After the release of the financial report of the two companies overseas, the operating income of the two companies decreased by more than 40% in the first quarter of 2021
In 2021, four overseas companies invested by ant in the early stage were listed successively: in July, zomato, an Indian digital life service platform, was listed; In August, the Indonesian e-commerce platform bukalapak was listed; In November, kakaopay, South Korea's largest mobile payment platform, was listed; In the same month, one97 communications, the parent company of paytm, India's largest mobile payment platform, went public.
The analyst said that according to public estimates, the investment income of ant group in 2021 may exceed 25 billion yuan. Part of it comes from the book income of the invested company after listing: ant group is an early investor of zomato, bukalapak and kakaopay. If it is conservatively calculated by only doubling the income, the book income of ant is about 19 billion yuan. In addition, when paytm was listed, ant sold about 5% of its shares, with a one-time gain of about 6 billion yuan.
This means that the book profit of ants calculated from Alibaba's financial report, after deducting these investment income, the operating profit of ants is estimated to be no more than 47 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of more than 20% in 2020.
Last April, ant group announced the rectification plan, covering its payment, credit investigation, consumption and other businesses. Since then, many businesses of ant have entered the contraction stage, including actively reducing the scale of yu'e Bao and shutting down mutual Bao. At the same time, ant has made efforts to explore the commercialization of science and technology and overseas development. It can be seen that ant is trying to find more business growth points to deal with the impact of financial business rectification.