Alibaba’s Qwen artificial intelligence app has surpassed 10 million downloads within its first week on iOS and Android, strengthening the Hangzhou-based group’s consumer strategy and lifting its Hong Kong-listed shares by more than 4 per cent on Monday.

The relaunch unifies earlier services under the Qwen banner and introduces agentic features intended to carry out tasks across shopping, mapping and productivity. Alibaba said the free app is based on the latest version of its Qwen large language model, describing it as “the best personal AI assistant with the most powerful model”. The company added: “With a single command, it can generate a full research report and automatically produce a polished, multi-slide PowerPoint presentation in seconds,” as reported by Reuters.

Alibaba Cloud, the group’s AI and cloud unit, said Qwen was “designed to meet both the professional and personal needs of users, with capabilities that include deep research, image generation and slide generation”. The firm indicated that future updates would integrate lifestyle services such as food delivery, travel bookings and e-commerce, positioning Qwen as a multipurpose app for consumers. Alibaba is also preparing an international version.

The early traction has prompted investors to focus on the company’s consumer roadmap, with quarterly results due on Tuesday. Ant Group, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, separately announced that its new multimodal assistant LingGuang reached around 2 million downloads in four days and topped the free tool category in Apple’s China App Store, highlighting rising competition across China’s AI sector.

Analysts noted the strategic choice to offer Qwen at no charge, contrasting with subscription-led models often used by international rivals. Su Lian Jye, chief analyst at Omdia, told South China Morning Post: “More users mean more feedback, which would allow Alibaba to further fine-tune its models.” The approach, Su said, “will only work for cloud service providers that have large capital reserves and can monetise user data.”

The push comes during a domestic price war triggered by DeepSeek and follows a rebrand from Tongyi, which had limited adoption compared with leading Chinese apps. Alibaba has rejected a Financial Times report alleging links to military applications, and observers in the United States have debated the pace and scale of the company’s AI investments.

Alibaba said the Qwen app is in public beta and will add agentic shopping support on platforms including Taobao in the coming months, evolving towards a fully functioning AI agent.

---