Alibaba’s Profit Slips as It Spends to Expand Its Empire
阿里巴巴利润下滑

SHENZHEN, China — Alibaba, the online shopping giant, is increasingly going offline.

中国深圳——线上购物巨头阿里巴巴(Alibaba)越来越走向线下。

The Chinese company on Friday reported a fall in profit of nearly 30 percent in the latest quarter, the first such decline in a year and a half. One reason: Alibaba got a bump in profit last year from selling its shares in a social media app. Another culprit, however, was heavy spending on Alibaba’s businesses outside of e-commerce, including cloud computing and brick-and-mortar retail — which the company, counterintuitively, likes to call “new retail.”

这家中国公司周五宣布最近一个季度利润下降近30%，这是它一年半以来利润首次下滑。其中一个原因是，阿里巴巴去年卖出一款社交媒体应用的股份，利润激增。但另一个根本原因是，阿里巴巴在电子商务之外的业务领域支出巨大，包括云计算和实体零售。阿里巴巴有违直觉地喜欢把后者叫做“新零售”。

Those ventures are part of Alibaba’s plan to broaden its empire and become more of a full-service technology company akin to Google. But some investors appear to be fretting about the cost of such expansion to the company’s profits. Alibaba has already lost around $60 billion in market value since its shares peaked in January.

这些业务是阿里巴巴扩大商业帝国，变得更像一家类似于谷歌(Google)的全服务科技公司计划的一部分。但一些投资者似乎担心这种扩张对公司利润的影响。自1月股价达到最高点以来，阿里巴巴的市值已蒸发大约600亿美元（约合3800亿元人民币）。

They remain well above their level a year ago, however, thanks to strength in Alibaba’s core online business. In the first three months of the year, total revenue increased by more than 60 percent over the same period last year, the company said Friday. It added that it expects a similar pace of sales growth for the coming financial year.

然而，多亏了核心的线上业务实力雄厚，阿里巴巴的表现仍远超一年前的水平。该公司周五表示，今年前三个月总收入同比增加逾60%。阿里巴巴还补充说，预计下一财年的销售增长会保持相似的水平。

For what has become one of the biggest internet companies on the planet, figuring out how to get even bigger was never going to be straightforward. Or cheap.

对于已是全球最大互联网公司之一的阿里巴巴来说，搞清楚怎么进一步扩大规模从来都不是一件简单的事情。也不是一件低成本的事。

In March, Alibaba poured an additional $2 billion into its Southeast Asian online emporium, Lazada, which is duking it out with Amazon in the region. Back at home in China, the company is investing heavily in its entertainment and cloud services businesses, both of which lose money. And it is rapidly expanding its footprint in physical retail, to collect more different kinds of data about customers’ habits and desires.

3月，阿里巴巴再次向其在东南亚的线上商城拉扎达(Lazada)注入20亿美元。拉扎达正在该地区同亚马逊(Amazon)竞争。在中国国内，阿里巴巴正在大举投资娱乐和云服务业务，这两个领域目前都处于亏损状态。此外，阿里巴巴还在迅速扩大其在实体零售领域的印迹，以便收集更多不同类型的消费者习惯和意愿相关数据。

But compared with being an online middleman, running stores in the real world is costly and complex. Hema, the company’s chain of high-tech supermarkets, now has dozens of stores across China, a large chunk of which opened in the first four months of this year alone.

但和充当线上中间商相比，在现实世界中开店代价高昂，情况复杂。该公司的高科技连锁超市盒马目前在中国各地有几十家门店，其中很大一部分是在今年前4个月开张的。

Modest minimarts these are not. A typical store might feature tanks of live lobsters and crabs, a bar with beer on tap and a grill where steaks are cooked to order. Bags of groceries zip on conveyors above shoppers’ heads on their way to being delivered to nearby homes.

它们不是简陋的便利店。典型的盒马门店里可能会有成箱的活龙虾和螃蟹、一个提供桶装啤酒的酒吧和一个现点现做牛排的烧烤店。袋装的食品杂货在消费者头顶的传送带上运输，再送往附近的消费者家中。

Fresh food aside, Alibaba has also invested in an electronics retailer, a home-improvement chain and a department store operator. Recently, it opened a mall in its home city, Hangzhou. It took control last year of its logistics affiliate, Cainiao, and in April it swallowed up a food-delivery service, Ele.me.

除新鲜食品外，阿里巴巴还投资了一家电子产品零售商、一个家居装饰连锁和一家百货商店运营商。最近，该公司在其大本营所在的城市杭州开了一家购物中心。阿里巴巴去年取得了对其物流子公司菜鸟的控制权，并在4月收购了送餐服务公司饿了么。

All of these could someday help turn Alibaba into the vast digital enabler of on- and offline commerce that it wishes to be. But for now, they are new and unfamiliar activities for a company that prides itself on not owning much in the way of merchandise, warehouses, delivery trucks or other physical assets.

也许有一天，所有这些会帮助阿里巴巴如愿以偿，成为一个庞大的线上和线下商业平台。但目前，对一家以没有太多商品、仓库、送货卡车或其他有形资产而自豪的公司来说，这些都是它不熟悉的新领域。

It does not help that the company’s archrival in China, the internet conglomerate Tencent, is also storming into many of these same businesses, including traditional retail.

而且阿里巴巴在中国的劲敌、互联网企业集团腾讯也在大举进军很多相同的业务领域，包括传统零售。

“I like Hema,” said Tian X. Hou, founder of T.H. Data Capital, a research firm in Beijing. “But Alibaba management is going to have to do a lot of thinking, and go through a lot of trial and error.”

 “我喜欢盒马，”北京研究公司天灏资本的创始人侯晓天说。“但阿里巴巴管理层必须要多动脑筋，要经历大量的试错。”

Despite investors’ worries, Ms. Hou said, Alibaba executives are at least sounding more resolute about their commitment to this new, offline future for the company.

侯晓天说，尽管投资者感到担忧，但阿里巴巴的高管至少听上去对致力于公司新的线下未来决心很大。

“They are fully communicating with the Street: ‘We’re doing it. And we actually do not care what you think, because we think it’s great, and it is the way to reach offline customers. It’s the way to sell in product categories that are not sold online. It is the way for us to expand.’”

“他们正在与华尔街充分沟通：我们正在这么做。我们其实并不在乎你们怎么想，因为我们认为它很好，是获取线下客户的途径，是销售不在线上销售的产品品类的方式，是我们扩张的方式。”