Alibaba sales growth soars into the cloud

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's sales soared 55 percent in the last quarter, thanks in part to a more than doubling of revenue from cloud computing, the company said Wednesday. The year-on-year growth in group sales, to 34.29 billion yuan (5.14 billion US dollars), was not matched by net profit, which slid 66 percent to 7.62 billion yuan (1.14 billion US dollars).