Alibaba's Jiang Fan looks forward to instant retail: profitability expected in fiscal year 2029

Author | Huang Yu

As the only strategic project within Alibaba Group that can compete with AI today, the Taobao Flash Sale business has shown strong growth, surpassing Alibaba Cloud, and becoming the fastest-growing business segment in Alibaba's revenue in the fourth quarter of last year.

On March 19, Alibaba released its Q3 financial report for fiscal year 2026 (October to December 2025), which showed that in the fourth quarter of last year, the instant retail business grew by 56% year-on-year to 20.84 billion yuan.

However, the instant retail business, which is still in a phase of large-scale investment, continues to drag down Alibaba's profits and cash flow.

During the financial report conference call on the same day, Jiang Fan, CEO of Alibaba's China e-commerce business group, stated that for the future development expectations of instant retail, the company maintains its goal of exceeding one trillion yuan in overall transaction volume for instant retail in fiscal year 2028. Based on this scale, it believes that it can achieve positive cash flow at scale.

“At the same time, we expect the instant retail business segment to achieve overall profitability in fiscal year 2029.”

Marked by the upgrade of the instant retail business "Xiaoshida" under Taotian to "Taobao Flash Sale" last April, Alibaba's grand strategic goal of building a "large consumption platform" began to gradually unfold.

Soon, Alibaba completed the strategic integration of Taotian Group, Ele.me, and Fliggy, officially establishing Alibaba's China e-commerce business group, with the goal of incorporating dispersed scenarios such as "long-distance e-commerce," "nearby instant retail," and "local life services" into a unified system through the construction of a unified large consumption platform.

Alibaba has high hopes for Taobao Flash Sale, hoping it will help Taobao upgrade from an "e-commerce platform" to a "large consumption platform," solidifying its core e-commerce landscape and reconstructing ecological competitive barriers with high-frequency business.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Alibaba continued to increase its investment in Taobao Flash Sale. The financial report pointed out that thanks to improved logistics efficiency, improved order structure, and high customer retention rates, the unit economic benefits and average transaction value of the instant retail business continued to improve month-on-month.

In addition, the synergy between instant retail and e-commerce has emerged, driving a double-digit year-on-year increase in monthly active consumers on the Taobao App.

Jiang Fan also pointed out that over the past year, the impact of Flash Sale on the overall platform has been significant, with the annual active buyers in the e-commerce market, including Flash Sale, increasing by 150 million, the annual active buyers in physical e-commerce increasing by 100 million, and the growth of annual active buyers in Taobao's physical e-commerce exceeding the total of the past three years