By Dhirendra Tripathi

Investing.com – Alibaba ADRs (NYSE 🙂 plunged 8.8% during premarket trade Thursday following a 10% jump in third quarter revenue. This was the slowest growth of the internet giant since it went public in September 2014.

For a company which was experiencing a 40 percent growth rate, this is a dramatic reversal. This serves to highlight the Chinese government’s clampdown on their operations. While competition increased, consumer spending has slowed.

The company suffered a huge loss in its investment portfolio and lost 74% to 20.4 million yuan ($3.2Billion). Some warnings were in place for this at the time of the 11-day China’s Single’s Day online sales fest held in November.

Alibaba started this practice in 2009 as a one-day event. In 2008, its gross merchandise volume increased 8.5% to $84.5 million. It was also the first time that the growth has slowed below 10%. The sales from JD.com’s extravaganza (NASDAQ:) had grown by 29%.

With 1.28 billion customers active, the company ended December with 43 million new customers. Cloud revenues soared 20%

The Chinese government forced Alibaba’s finance affiliate Ant Group to call off what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering in 2020. It went on to create more challenges for the company’s businesses.

Bloomberg reports this week that the authorities asked state-owned banks and firms to conduct a new round of financial risk checks and to link to Ant Group.