We recently published an article titled Why These 15 E-Commerce Stocks Are Skyrocketing So Far In 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) stands against the other e-commerce stocks.
The e-commerce sector has been on fire for a while in the post-COVID era, and while it did slow down a little along with most tech stocks, it has recovered significantly due to strong consumer demand. We’ve seen some players like Temu have explosive growth with cheap Chinese products flooding the U.S. market. And while there was a scare of De Minimis being ended, Trump has reinstated it. Moreover, U.S.-based e-commerce companies have also done well.
Global e-commerce sales are projected to hit $6.56 trillion this year and could grow even more in the coming years as AI improves logistics and supply chains. E-commerce companies are also expanding into fintech and cloud computing businesses.
If the broader market continues to do well in the coming quarters, this industry could deliver solid returns for investors. As such, it’s a good idea to look into the stocks spearheading the gains so far this year.
Methodology
For this article, I screened the top-performing e-commerce stocks year-to-date. Stocks that I have covered recently will be excluded from this list.
I will also mention the number of hedge fund investors in these stocks. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
An e-commerce platform displaying a wide range of products to customers online.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q4 2024: 107
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is an e-commerce and cloud computing company that is increasingly becoming involved with AI.
The stock is up significantly so far in 2025 after Alibaba reported solid earnings for the December quarter of 2024, with revenue reaching $38.6 billion (280.2 billion yuan). This was an 8% year-over-year increase and marked its fastest revenue growth in over a year.
The company’s Cloud Intelligence Group saw a 13% year-over-year revenue increase, while e-commerce also performed well. Net profit surged to $6.72 billion (48.9 billion yuan).
Also, the DeepSeek spook ended up drawing a lot of attention towards cheap tech stocks in China with their own AI models. Alibaba came up with its own AI model quickly after DeepSeek became viral and said it was better than DeepSeek V3.
The consensus price target of $138.36 implies 3.32% upside.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is up 58.18% year-to-date.
Overall BABA ranks 1st on our list of the e-commerce stocks that are skyrocketing so far in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of BABA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than BABA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
