On Thursday Eastern Time, Alibaba's closing market value was surpassed by Pinduoduo, losing its first position as a Chinese e-commerce giant.
On the same day, Wall Street investment banks made a rare move to downgrade Alibaba's rating.
Alibaba's rating has been downgraded by Damo
On Thursday Eastern Time, Morgan Stanley downgraded Alibaba's ADR rating from "overweight" to "wait-and-see" and lowered its target price from $110 to $90. This is the first time since the end of June that Alibaba ADR has been downgraded.
Morgan Stanley's Eddy Wang and other analysts wrote in a report that Alibaba's recovery rate was slower than expected, and its decision to suspend the spin off of Alibaba Cloud business "brought uncertainty to the value release brought by the restructuring.".
Morgan Stanley also removed Alibaba from its A-share/Hong Kong stock follow list and replaced it with Chinalco, which is listed on the A-share market.
Overall, Wall Street is still generally optimistic about Alibaba, with 44 buy ratings and 8 hold ratings for its ADR.
Pinduoduo officially ascends to the top of China's e-commerce giant
At the same time, Morgan Stanley has listed Pinduoduo as the top choice in the Chinese e-commerce field, believing that the company is "in the best position" in the context of consumers becoming increasingly price sensitive.
The latest Q3 performance report released by Pinduoduo shows that the company achieved a revenue of 68.84 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 93.9%. The sales of its cross-border e-commerce platform Temu have exceeded 5 billion US dollars, especially in September. On the occasion of its first anniversary of launch, the daily GMV even reached 80 million US dollars.
Boosted by this strong financial report, Pinduoduo's stock price rose for three consecutive days, driving the company's market value to surpass Alibaba for the first time and officially becoming the top Chinese e-commerce giant.
As of Thursday's close, Pinduoduo closed up 4.03% at $147.44 per share, with a market value of $195.9 billion, surpassing Alibaba for the first time, with the latter closing at $190.7 billion.
Since the beginning of this year, Alibaba has fallen by about 15% in the US stock market, while Pinduoduo has surged by over 80%.