Why Are Alibaba Shares Surging On Tuesday?

by | Mar 10, 2026 | General

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) climbed in premarket trading on Tuesday. The move follows a series of developments around the company’s Qwen large language model strategy.

Key Leader Departs Qwen Team

Last week, Lin Junyang, who led Qwen3-Max — a model with over 1 trillion parameters — announced his exit on social media. Yu Bowen, head of post-training, followed shortly after.

Alibaba hired Zhou Hao, a former senior staff research scientist at Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG)  Google DeepMind, to replace Yu Bowen, the South China Morning Post reported.

CEO Addresses Leadership Gap

In an internal email, CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren will continue leading Tongyi Lab, China Daily reported Saturday.

Qwen’s daily active users hit 73.5 million during the Lunar New Year campaign, up from 17 million prior, per Morgan Stanley. The app processed nearly 200 million orders in two weeks.

Technical Analysis

Alibaba’s stock is currently navigating challenging technical waters, trading 9.1% below its 20-day simple moving average (SMA) and 14.8% below its 100-day SMA.

Over the past 12 months, the stock has seen a marginal increase of 0.08%, reflecting a period of consolidation after significant volatility.

The stock’s current price of $135.69 positions it between its 52-week high of $192.67 and low of $95.73, indicating a mid-range stance in its yearly cycle.

The Relative Strength Index at 25.64 suggests the stock is in oversold territory.

Earnings & Analyst Outlook

The countdown is on: Alibaba is estimated to report earnings on Mar. 19.

  • EPS Estimate: $1.73 (Down from $2.93 YoY)
  • Revenue Estimate: $41.26 Billion (Up from $38.38 Billion YoY)
  • Valuation: P/E of 17.5x (Indicates fair valuation)

The stock carries a Buy Rating with an average price target of $173.31.

Recent analyst moves include:

  • Jefferies: Buy (Lowers Target to $225.00) (Jan. 8)
  • Freedom Capital Markets: Downgraded to Hold (Jan. 6)
  • Citigroup: Buy (Raises Target to $225.00) (Nov. 26, 2025)

BABA Price Action: Alibaba shares were up 2.37% at $135.78 during premarket trading on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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