Dive Brief:

• Alibaba's Q3 sales rose 32% year over year on strong holiday sales, to 34.5 billion renminbi, or about $5.3 billion, beating estimates. Shares rose 4% in premarket trading after taking something of a beating, down 14% so far this year.

• Gross merchandise volume on its Chinese marketplaces increased 23% in the quarter, its slowest annual growth in more than three years. Q3 revenue from its marketplaces reached $149 billion, with 68% from mobile.

• JD.com appears to be giving a run for Alibaba’s money. While it’s not a straight comparison because the two Chinese retail giants report GMV differently, JD.com's 82% GMV growth in the first nine months of last year handily surpassed Alibaba’s 34%, according to Reuters. 

Dive Insight:

Alibaba’s strong performance could bode well for consumer spending in China, which shows serious signs of slowing. Many analysts still expect Alibaba to get hit by that.

The retail giant appears to face increasingly stiff competition from rival JD.com, which like Alibaba has worked to boost sales from foreign retail companies in China. While Alibaba has talked in recent months of the potential of reaching consumers in rural China, JD.com has focused on reaching the more affluent shoppers in urban areas.

Indeed, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang earlier this month seemed to walk back that commitment to expanding in rural areas, saying that the company would be “looking to grow its already large operations in China's biggest cities,” according to a notice its corporate news site, Alizila. 

Alibaba is also looking to bring in other sources of income beyond its e-commerce operations, investing in video content, cloud computing, media, and on-demand services, according to Bloomberg.The strategy sounds in part familiar to Amazon's, which has invested in streaming services and media, as well as its profitable cloud service.