You mentioned Olam in your question. And indeed, following several years of hard work, I think Olam is very much is on the right track. Unit economics are positive and continue to improve. Things continue to move in the right direction in terms of the number of orders the number of users as well as the unit economics. So when we talk about to-home, this is local or neighborhood e-commerce. So deliveries from restaurant to home are 1 example of that, but it’s not just restaurant food orders. It could also include things like medicine, it could include groceries or other kinds of daily essentials. But to succeed in this space, you need to be able to successfully integrate local neighborhood supply neighborhood demand and neighborhood level fulfillment all in 1 place at the same time.
And again, this is something that certainly no media outlet could ever possibly hope to achieve. And this is where Eluma has been a great success because you need to be able to integrate in real-time local supply, the local demand and the local fulfillment capabilities, they only need to intersect in the space-time continuum in a single coordinate in a way that achieves chemical synergies. So that’s far beyond the capabilities of any media-oriented player. We continue to successfully grow our local services business in the priority cities we’ve identified. And of course, your business will look very different if you’re going after 50 cities versus 100 cities. We continue to focus on the key cities that we’ve identified, continuing to improve the service to win and build confidence with consumers and drive long-term growth.
Operator: The next question is from Jiong Shao from Barclays.
Jiong Shao: Thank you, management. Toby, you said that in the past quarter, free cash flow exceeded USD 11 billion. And we know that there are other initiatives underway within Alibaba to monetize on certain investments. And in the last quarter, you conducted a USD 3.3 billion of share buybacks under the buyback program. But I’m wondering what other potential methods could be available for Alibaba to increase shareholder value to increase returns to shareholders. Are there any other things you can for example, considering distributing dividends or further expanding the scale of the share buyback program?
Daniel Zhang: Thank you for your question. You touched on a couple of things. First, as you all will have seen from various media reports, we have been divesting some of our investments. I think that’s normal for any corporate any company that’s making a lot of strategic investments is also at some point going to make a timely exit from those investments. And that’s indeed part of the original plan. When you make those current strategic investments, you are planning on exiting at a certain point. You also talked about our share buyback program. In fact, it had already been upsized, as previously announced. It had been a USD 25 billion program. And as we spoke about last time, that was increased by USD 15 billion to a total of USD 40 billion.
In the December quarter, we bought back another USD 3.3 billion of shares, and we do think that pursuing the share buyback program is a good way to return value to our shareholders. Now under the existing already enlarged share buyback programs, we still have a remaining quota of USD 21 billion to be deployed. So at this point in time, no, we are not considering further expanding that quarter, rather, what’s on our minds at this point in time is how we can best make use of that remaining quota of USD 21 billion, how to deploy it and when to deploy it in line with the authorization given to us by the Board of Directors in order to further enhance shareholder value.
Operator: The next question is from Alicia Yap from Citigroup.
