Dive Brief:

• Alibaba has written a detailed rebuttal to the lead story in Barron’s published over the weekend suggesting that the Chinese retail giant’s stock could fall another 50% due to a host of factors, from China’s slowing economy and the saturation of its middle-class market to what Barron’s Jonathan Laing says are questionable financial moves.

• Alibaba responded with a lengthy rebuttal sent to journalists and posted online, questioning many of Laing’s numbers, claims, and most pointedly his conclusions.

• Monday morning has seen continued discussion of the issue in columns and on social media, piling on on both sides.

Dive Insight:

Laing's lengthy piece regarding Albaba’s stock price fall laid out skepticism about many of Alibaba’s claims about how many customers it has attracted and how much shoppers spend there. He also included some hard truths about the saturation of China’s middle-class consumer market and the apparent slowdown of its economy.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal Sunday also published a snapshot of the current Chinese economy that detailed a slowdown that is bleeding into the country’s tech boom.

“Winter is coming…I think the startup boom is cooling down,” Yu Xiaoyang, who left Chinese Internet company Tencent Holdings Ltd. last year to start online medical consultation, told the Wall Street Journal.

What is hard to ignore is China’s economic trouble. China seems to have quickly shifted to a consumer- and government-spending-driven economy, which will be highly dependent on consumer confidence. Spending appears to have softened and much of the growth in retail sales driven by a switch from brick-and-mortar sales to e-commerce, a more zero-sum scenario than the growth in e-commerce may suggest, according to Gordon G. Chang writing in Forbes Sunday.

But South African entrepreneur and author Alan Knott-Craig argued Monday morning that Barron’s take is a fundamental misreading of the climate that Alibaba and other platforms find themselves in, which is largely unprecedented and, for now anyway, unregulated globally. 

“Alibaba is not a FindYourNearestPet app,” Knott-Craig writes. “Alibaba is the world’s largest eCommerce platform. The former is tech-as-a-fad, the latter is monopoly-for-life.”