CITIC Securities: Maintain "Buy" rating for Alibaba(09988, BABA.US), expecting continued investment around the "Consumer + AI" strategy

CITIC Securities released a research report stating that during the Spring Festival, Alibaba (09988, BABA.US) has been actively advancing in the AI field, with model upgrades and application deployment progressing simultaneously, further strengthening its full-stack AI layout. On the evening of February 16, the company open-sourced and released Qwen3.5-Plus, which adopts a hybrid MoE sparse architecture, with a total of 397 billion parameters and 17 billion activations. Despite a roughly 60% reduction in GPU memory usage, inference throughput increased by up to 19 times, with API prices as low as 0.8 yuan per million tokens, balancing performance and cost efficiency, laying a foundational capability for future Agent applications. On the application side, Qianwen launched a 3 billion yuan “Spring Festival Guest Invitation Plan,” with orders surpassing 10 million in 9 hours, totaling 120 million AI shopping orders, with a daily active user count of 73.52 million, fully integrated into the core ecosystem, upgrading from a dialogue tool to a verifiable assistant. Overall, this round of actions demonstrates the company’s coordinated advancement across models, computing power, cloud services, and application ecosystems. The bank maintains that the company will continue to invest around the “Consumer + AI” strategy, driving the core business upward. It remains optimistic about the company’s unique position as a high-quality Chinese full-stack AI asset and its long-term investment value, maintaining a “Buy” rating for the company’s Hong Kong and U.S. stocks.