Alibaba and Tencent face end of an era as sales start to shrink

The mascot for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s Taobao ecommerce platform at the company’s affiliated hotel in Hangzhou, China. The speed and ferocity with which Beijing clamped down on online commerce, car-sharing, food delivery and gaming irrevocably reset growth expectations for the industry last year. But Alibaba has taken a harder hit than many of its peers. — Bloomberg

For almost a decade, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd embodied China’s economic miracle, sustaining a dizzying pace of growth and approaching trillion-dollar valuations with splashy forays into every corner of the Internet.

That spectacular run could officially end on Aug 4, when the ecommerce powerhouse that Jack Ma founded is expected to record its first-ever decline in quarterly revenue – one of the few major Chinese Internet corporations to do so, ever. Fellow billionaire Pony Ma’s Tencent, the social media powerhouse, could follow suit days later.