Alibaba Group Holding has been named the world’s most admired Chinese internet and retail company, according to the latest rankings by US business magazine Fortune, as the technology giant unveils an artificial intelligence (AI) model aimed at competing with China’s hottest start-up, DeepSeek.
The Hangzhou-based company, owner of the South China Morning Post, came third in the internet service and retailing category on Fortune’s 2025 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, trailing only US rivals Amazon.com and Alphabet. It climbed five spots from eighth place last year.
However, Alibaba did not make it into the top 50 in the overall rankings, which were led by Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and Berkshire Hathaway.
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Alibaba is among a growing list of Chinese companies heavily investing in AI models. Last week, the company’s cloud computing and AI arm, Alibaba Cloud, released an upgraded version of its Qwen model, the Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed to have “comprehensively outperformed” the V3 model launched in December by Chinese start-up DeepSeek that has drawn comparison to advanced products from OpenAI.
Alibaba Cloud said its Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek’s V3 model. Photo: AP Photo alt=Alibaba Cloud said its Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek’s V3 model. Photo: AP Photo>
DeepSeek has drawn worldwide attention for its new open-source reasoning model, R1, which the company said had achieved capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s closed-source GPT models in some areas at a fraction of the usual cost.
Last month, DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng took part in a meeting hosted by Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing.
Alibaba Cloud said the benchmark performance of Qwen 2.5-Max was also on a par with US firm Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet model.
The company has been expanding overseas amid a slowing Chinese economy, despite facing what Alibaba Group co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai described as “the most challenging geopolitical environment in decades”.
In 2022, the US government reviewed Alibaba’s cloud business to assess potential national security risks. The company is also one of several Chinese tech firms affected by US export controls on advanced semiconductors.
At its annual developer summit in Indonesia in January, Alibaba Cloud said its latest models under the Qwen family had been made accessible to global developers via application programming interfaces on its generative AI development platform, Model Studio.
Alibaba has been restructuring its sprawling business empire to focus on core areas, including e-commerce and cloud computing. CEO Eddie Wu Yongming referred to generative AI as a “historic opportunity” and said the company expected “ongoing explosive growth” in the demand for computing power and its AI models.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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