DingTalk, the workplace collaboration app developed by Alibaba Group Holding, has generated over US$200 million in core revenues over the past six months in a sign of its commercial potential.
The app achieved an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of over US$200 million in the six months ended September 30, or the first half of Alibaba’s 2025 financial year, the Alibaba unit said on Thursday. ARR is a metric to indicate how much money is generated annually from subscriptions, which in DingTalk’s case is software subscriptions.
The milestone means DingTalk has found a viable commercial model in the business-to-business (B2B) service market in China, DingTalk president Ye Jun said. “DingTalk has established a pathway for monetisation that is suited to China’s B2B sector,” Ye said at a corporate event held in the southern city of Zhuhai on Thursday.
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Alibaba’s workplace tool, which allows project collaboration and document sharing, is competing with similar products from TikTok owner ByteDance and Tencent Holdings for corporate users.
Ye was quoted by Chinese magazine Caijing on Thursday as saying that the Alibaba unit planned to achieve break-even in 2025. He said DingTalk had to rely on capital injections from Alibaba Group to survive in the past, which is “unhealthy”, and stressed that the unit needs to “operate independently like a normal company”.
That is in line with the broader strategy outlined by Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu Yongming in August.
In a conference call with analysts that month, Wu said Alibaba expects to see most of its business units beyond e-commerce and cloud services to “break even within one to two years and gradually contribute to profitability at scale”, as the e-commerce giant continues to improve profitability across the board.
DingTalk, once a unit under Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, became a separate business last August amid the tech giant’s largest-ever corporate restructuring unveiled in March last year. The unit has stepped up its efforts in monetisation over the past year, betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and a comprehensive software ecosystem within the app to attract new business clients.
The latest milestone comes at a time when DingTalk, which had 700 million users and 25 million business clients at the end of 2023, is facing heightened competition from online workplace apps developed by other Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance’s Feishu and Tencent’s WeCom, the corporate version of WeChat.
Feishu, which has also yet to achieve profitability, expected its ARR to exceed US$300 million for the full year of 2024, its CEO Xie Xin said in September. WeCom has not disclosed its revenue data, but said in January that it would achieve profitability earlier than DingTalk and Feishu.
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