Alibaba Turns Positive After Price Target Increase On Cloud, E-commerce Optimism

Alibaba Group Holding Inc. flipped from losses to gains in Monday's session, despite a rough morning for tech stocks, after MKM Partners increased its price target on the stock and said its cloud offering is poised to dominate the Chinese market. MKM Partners analyst Rob Sanderson hiked his 12-month price target to $177 from $155 and extolled Alibaba's opportunity in e-commerce as well as enterprise technology in the world's most populous country. "The company's strategy extends well beyond eCommerce or its ecosystem of online properties; Alibaba aspires to digitize all business in China and serve billions of consumers globally," Sanderson wrote in a note stemming from the company's bullish analyst day last week. Sanderson also wrote a separate note on Alibaba's cloud business after attending a cloud computing conference in China over the weekend, calling the company's Alicloud offering "the largest pool of computing resources in Asia." Alibaba shares, which were trailing Friday's closing price early in the session, moved to daily gains of more than 1.5% after the notes arrived about an hour into Monday's trading session.