CITIC Securities: Maintains "Buy" rating for Alibaba, expects continuous investment in the "Consumption + AI" strategy.

Citigroup Securities issued a research report stating that during the Spring Festival, Alibaba took intensive actions in the field of AI, upgrading models and applications in sync, further strengthening its full-stack AI layout. On the evening of Chinese New Year's Eve on February 16, the company released Qwen3.5-Plus as open source, using a hybrid MoE sparse architecture with a total of 397 billion parameters and 17 billion activations. With a decrease in GPU memory usage by about 60%, the inference throughput has 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 solid foundation for subsequent Agent applications. On the application side, Qianwen launched a 3 billion yuan "Spring Festival hospitality plan," with orders exceeding 10 million within 9 hours, completing a total of 120 million AI shopping orders, and achieving a daily active users of 73.52 million, fully integrating into the core ecosystem, transitioning from a conversational tool to a capable assistant. Overall, these actions reflect the company's coordinated advancement in models, computing power, cloud, and application ecosystem. Overall, the bank believes that the company will continue to invest in its "consumer + AI" strategy, driving the sustained growth of the company's core business. The bank remains optimistic about the company as a unique player in quality Chinese full-stack AI assets, maintaining a "buy" rating on the company's Hong Kong and US stocks for its long-term investment value.