The Chinese e-commerce and technology giant ended December with 128,197 employees, down from 194,320 a year earlier.<\/p>\n
The disclosure of its latest headcount came in an earnings report released Thursday that showed the firm’s profit plunging 67% and its revenue missing expectations for the last three months of last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The company’s shares in Hong Kong were trading down 6% Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Stock Chart Icon<\/title>Stock chart icon<\/p>\n<div class=\"Collapsible-proLivePlayerCloseOrExpand\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>The bulk of Alibaba’s workforce reduction was revealed in its March 2025 quarter following the sale of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alibabagroup.com\/en-US\/document-1811266069768175616\" target=\"_blank\">Sun Art <\/a>retail group at the end of 2024. The tech giant also exited its stake in\u00a0department store chain <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alibabagroup.com\/en-US\/document-1805750470585614336\" target=\"_blank\">Intime<\/a> around the same period.<\/p>\n<p>China’s second-largest tech company by market cap is amongst a raft of other major tech firms that have reduced headcounts in the past year from Silicon Valley to Hangzhou, China.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Alibaba’s staff has supported its sprawling network of business units spanning e-commerce, cloud, logistics, and other related services.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>However, Alibaba has been steadily reducing headcount in recent years, though the latest cuts were much larger than the 11% reduction in December 2024 from the prior year.<\/p>\n<p>This comes as Alibaba has sought to offload labor-intensive holdings and restructure its core businesses, with a major focus on artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n<p>The tech giant aims to become a full-stack AI company spanning semiconductor manufacturing to computing and AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The company this week launched an agentic AI service known as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2026\/03\/17\/alibaba-wukong-ai-enterprise-tool-restructuring-qwen-exits.html\">Wukong<\/a> for businesses, and hiked prices for its cloud and storage services by as much as 34% due to rising demand and supply chain costs.<\/p>\n<p>Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said during an earnings call Thursday that the company aimed to grow its cloud and AI revenue to over $100 billion annually over the next five years. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ArticleBody-googlePreferredSourceContainer\" data-module=\"GooglePreferredSource\" data-id=\"RegularArticle-GooglePreferredSource-5\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/preferences\/source?q=https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2026\/03\/20\/alibaba-headcount-falls-ai-push-sun-art-intime-sales.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Alibaba stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition Center in Shanghai, China, on July 5, 2024. Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images Alibaba‘s workforce shrank by roughly 34% over the course of 2025, as the company offloaded some of its offline retail businesses while doubling down on artificial … <a title=\"Alibaba workforce shrinks 34% in 2025 as Chinese tech giant doubles down on AI\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/?p=24415\" aria-label=\"Read more about Alibaba workforce shrinks 34% in 2025 as Chinese tech giant doubles down on AI\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Alibaba-workforce-shrinks-34-in-2025-as-Chinese-tech-giant.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24417,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24415\/revisions\/24417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}