Alibaba-W (09988) rose nearly 3% again, up 2.77% to HK$115.1 as of the time of writing, with a trading volume of HK$4.986 billion. Haitong International issued a research report noting that Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-Max-Preview this month—a sparse mixture-of-experts AI model with 2.4 trillion parameters. The firm believes Qwen 3.8 represents an important step for Alibaba in showcasing its technical strength amid recent model iterations, leading it to narrow its loss forecast for the food delivery business and raise its profit margin forecast for cloud operations. Due to weaker-than-expected overall retail sales growth in May and a less-than-ideal performance during the 618 shopping festival, Alibaba’s core CMR is expected to slow. However, the firm believes market concerns over slowing revenue growth and margin compression in Alibaba Cloud have largely subsided, as cloud segment profitability will benefit from the higher average margins of its AI cloud business.