--- title: "CICC: Maintains Alibaba \"Outperform Industry\" Rating, Strengthens Internal Collaboration and Commercial Exploration" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/279348208.md" description: "CICC maintains Alibaba's \"Outperform\" rating with a target price of HKD 197. On March 16, Alibaba established the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, focusing on the creation, delivery, and application of tokens. The ATH business group consists of five major divisions, aiming to break down barriers in AI-related businesses and enhance internal collaboration. CICC believes this move will accelerate the commercialization loop from model to application and improve resource utilization, while also needing to balance the exploration of foundational large models with commercialization goals" datetime: "2026-03-17T01:33:04.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/279348208.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/279348208.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/279348208.md) --- # CICC: Maintains Alibaba "Outperform Industry" Rating, Strengthens Internal Collaboration and Commercial Exploration According to the Zhitong Finance APP, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) released a research report maintaining Alibaba (09988) with an "outperform industry" rating and a target price of HKD 197. Alibaba announced the establishment of the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group to break down barriers in AI-related businesses and strengthen internal strategic collaboration. ## CICC's main viewpoints are as follows: **Recent Events** On March 16, Alibaba announced the establishment of the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, which will focus on the creation, delivery, and application of Tokens. Alibaba CEO Eric Wu will directly oversee the ATH business group. **Breaking Down Barriers in AI-Related Businesses and Strengthening Internal Strategic Collaboration** The ATH business group will consist of five major divisions, including Tongyi Laboratory (responsible for the research and development of the Qwen large model), MaaS business line (building an efficient and open model service platform and technical system), Qianwen Division (creating personal AI assistants), Wukong Division (related to DingTalk, creating a B-end AI native work platform), and AI Innovation Division (exploring AI innovative applications). Tongyi Laboratory is responsible for creating Tokens, the MaaS business line is responsible for delivering Tokens, and Qianwen, Wukong, and Innovation Applications are responsible for applying Tokens, forming a complete system of model capabilities, middleware capabilities, and TO C and TO B application capabilities. The firm believes that Alibaba's organizational structure, which integrates research and development, products, and applications, has advantages in 1) accelerating the commercialization loop from models to applications and reducing friction costs between applications and data feeding back into models; 2) unifying the allocation of computing power for training and inference under limited computing resources to improve resource utilization; 3) reaffirming the core position of AI-related businesses within Alibaba's system, but Alibaba needs to balance the cutting-edge exploration of foundational large models with the commercialization goals on the product side. The firm believes that maintaining the leading advantage of the Qwen model in key areas is of significant importance to Alibaba. **Focusing on Tokens While Accelerating C-end and B-end Applications to Explore AI Commercialization** Since the second half of 2025, AI has made positive progress in multi-modal, coding, and agent capabilities, leading to a significant increase in demand for Tokens. During the Spring Festival, Alibaba Cloud's Coding Plan Tokens became the fastest-growing product in sales, which not only raised higher requirements for Token production capacity (computing power) but also formed potential directions for the landing and commercialization of Tokens. From a goal perspective, the firm believes that after the establishment of the business group, it is expected to connect various departmental technologies, revenues, DAUs, and other target directions with Tokens at the core, forming a unified business command. On the other hand, the establishment of the ATH business group will also integrate Alibaba's internal application ecosystem, facilitating the comprehensive coordination of B-end and C-end application landing, seizing potential opportunities on the application side beyond cloud and chips in 2026. **Risk Warning** Uncertainties in the macro economy and regulation, risks of intensified competition, and AI progress falling short of expectations ### Related Stocks - [BABA.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABA.US.md) - [09988.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/09988.HK.md) - [BABX.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABX.US.md) - [KBAB.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/KBAB.US.md) ## Related News & Research - [Alibaba confirms HappyHorse belongs to its ATH unit](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282314881.md) - [China's Alibaba Token Hub Is Behind Mysterious New AI Video Model HappyHorse](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282311435.md) - [These Allbirds AI jokes are as fire as the company's stock price](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282954479.md) - [Reid Hoffman weighs in on the ‘tokenmaxxing’ debate](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282851571.md) - [Core AI and Allianca Group Form Strategic Joint Venture | CHAI Stock News](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282685079.md)