Alibaba sees revenue growth of 48% in 2017

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba expects its full-year revenue for 2017 to rise 48%.

The group, which is currently facing a US investigation into its accounting practices, attributed part of the expected growth to acquisitions, although revenue excluding this is still forecast to jump 36%.

At the company’s first annual investor day on Tuesday, executive chairman and co-founder Jack Ma defended the company’s use of gross merchandise value to tally sales, saying other companies such as Ebay had used it.

The company said it would stop reporting its GMV on a quarterly basis and would instead switch to an annual basis.

Ma also reaffirmed his commitment to reaching $1trn in GMV by 2020 and serving 2bn billion customers by 2036.

Alibaba, which went public in 2014, announced back in May that its accounting methods were under investigation by the US securities regulator to determine whether they violated federal laws. The way the company reports data on Singles Day – China’s version of Black Friday – is also being investigated.

The group has also been criticised for selling counterfeit goods. Jack Ma said on Tuesday that Alibaba would do anything to stop the fake products but argued that many of them are better than the originals.

“The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names," he said.

"It's not the fake products that destroy them, it's the new business models. The exact factories, the exact raw materials, but they do not use their names."