(Photo: CGTN)

Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group reported a net profit of over 33 billion yuan (4.9 billion US dollars) in the third quarter of 2018 on Wednesday, despite recent concern over the Chinese market. The performance was far higher than expected.

Alibaba’s revenue reached 117.28 billion yuan in the third quarter, an increase of 41 percent compared with the same period in 2017, with sales in its core e-commerce business reaching nearly 103 billion yuan.

Zhang Yong, CEO of Alibaba, credited the Group's steady growth to their devotion to services in areas such as retailing and digital entertainment, which attracted nearly 700 million consumers, as well as digital transformation powered by cloud computing.

The group will continue investing in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and online entertainment. Over the past 10 years, 43 billion yuan has been put into its cloud business Alibaba Cloud.

Revenue from Alibaba Cloud exceeded 21 billion yuan in 2018, increasing by more than 20 times in the past four years, making the company the biggest cloud computing enterprise in Asia.

Statistics from Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, showed that Alibaba’s revenue gained from cloud computing has already surpassed Google and IBM in the global market.