Ali's Jiang Fan Looks Toward Instant Retail: Profit Expected in Fiscal Year 2029
Author | Huang Yu
As the only strategic project within Alibaba Group today that can rival AI, Taobao Flash Sale has experienced strong growth, surpassing Alibaba Cloud, and became the fastest growing business sector in Alibaba’s revenue during the fourth quarter last year.
On March 19, Alibaba released its Q3 financial report for fiscal year 2026 (October to December 2025), which showed that in the fourth quarter last year, instant retail business grew 56% year-on-year to 20.84 billion yuan.
However, instant retail is still in a period of large-scale investment and continues to drag down Alibaba’s profits and cash flow.
During the financial report conference call that day, Jiang Fan, CEO of Alibaba China E-commerce Business Group, said that for the future development expectations of instant retail, the company maintains its target of overall transaction scale exceeding one trillion yuan by fiscal year 2028, and believes that at this scale, a positive cash flow can be achieved.
“At the same time, we expect the instant retail business sector to achieve overall profitability in fiscal year 2029.”
Marked by the upgrade last April of Taotian’s instant retail business “Hourly Arrival” to “Taobao Flash Sale,” Alibaba’s grand strategic goal of building a “big consumption platform” began to gradually unfold.
Soon, Alibaba completed the strategic integration of Taotian Group, Ele.me, and Fliggy, officially establishing the Alibaba China E-commerce Business Group. The goal is to build a unified major consumption platform, incorporating fragmented scenes such as “long-distance e-commerce,” “near-field instant retail,” and “local life services” into the same system.
Alibaba holds high expectations for Taobao Flash Sale, hoping it will help Taobao upgrade from an “e-commerce platform” to a “big consumption platform,” reinforcing its core e-commerce territory with high-frequency businesses and reshaping its ecological competitive barriers.
In the fourth quarter last year, Alibaba continued to increase investment in Taobao Flash Sale. The financial report pointed out that thanks to improvements in fulfillment logistics efficiency, order structure, and high customer retention rate, the unit economics and average order value of instant retail business continued to improve quarter-on-quarter.
Additionally, the synergistic effect between instant retail and e-commerce became apparent, driving a double-digit year-on-year increase in monthly active consumers on the Taobao App.
Jiang Fan also pointed out that over the past year, the overall boost from Flash Sale to the platform has been significant. The e-commerce market, including Flash Sale, saw the number of annual active buyers increase by 150 million; physical e-commerce saw annual active buyers increase by 100 million, and the increase in annual active buyers of physical e-commerce on Taobao exceeded the total of the past three years.
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