For all their similarities, the near-term prospects of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE: BABA) have rarely looked more divergent than they do right now. Amazon is up around 17% year to date and was setting fresh all-time highs just last week following another impressive earnings report. Alibaba, meanwhile, is down roughly 8% over the same period, continues to trade around 2017 levels and reported a revenue miss in its earnings this week.
At first glance, that might make Alibaba look like the obvious value play. After all, the company trades on a lower price-to-earnings (PE) multiple than Amazon and still has meaningful upside if China’s economy stabilizes and its AI ambitions gain traction. However, once you dig deeper into growth, execution, and momentum, the picture starts looking very different.
In fact, there’s a strong argument that Amazon, despite appearing more expensive on the surface, may actually be the cheaper stock right now. Let’s jump in and take a closer look below.
Amazon Is Executing Much Better Right Now
The biggest difference between these two companies at the moment is execution. Amazon’s most recent earnings report reinforced just how strong the company’s current position really is. Revenue and earnings comfortably beat expectations, guidance remained strong, and investor hopes for AWS continue to build as artificial intelligence (AI) spending explodes across the broader market.
That AWS angle is incredibly important. Amazon stopped being valued simply as an e-commerce company many years ago.
The shift to it being a computing powerhouse, though, is still underway, and there’s a ton more upside. Investors are increasingly viewing it as one of the key infrastructure providers powering the AI boom, and that shift is still gathering pace month on month.
The company’s massive capital expenditure plans, which spooked investors earlier this year, are now being lauded as strategic rather than derided as reckless.
Investors can clearly see the payoff emerging through AWS’s growth trajectory, rising AI demand, and an enormous contracted backlog that bodes well for the coming years.
That helps explain why the stock has gone from strength to strength in the past month alone, and was setting fresh all-time highs just last week. In short, Amazon looks like a company firing on all cylinders.
Alibaba Still Looks Like a Sleeping Giant
That doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to be excited about Alibaba right now—to be clear, the so-called Chinese Amazon still has plenty going for it. The company remains one of the most important technology and e-commerce businesses in China. While the stock has been depressed for several years, there are legitimate reasons many investors continue to believe it could eventually stage a major comeback.
In addition, many analysts remain bullish on the company’s long-term positioning in key areas. Take this week’s note from Citi, for example, which highlighted growing optimism around Alibaba’s AI cloud opportunity and broader ecosystem strength.
There is also an increasingly popular view that Alibaba’s AI investments remain significantly underappreciated by the market.
The problem is that the actual business momentum still does not fully support that optimism.
Alibaba’s latest quarterly results, released May 13, missed revenue expectations, reinforcing concerns that the company is still struggling to regain the kind of growth profile investors once expected.
Weakening Comeback Potential
That will hurt the comeback narrative because Alibaba has spent the past several years trying to convince investors that a stronger growth phase is just around the corner. Unlike Amazon, which is increasingly being rewarded for execution and strategic clarity, Alibaba still looks more like a potential turnaround story that needs to rebuild investor trust first and foremost.
The broader China overhang also remains difficult to ignore, with geopolitical concerns and slower domestic growth continuing to weigh on sentiment toward Chinese equities. That doesn’t mean Alibaba can’t eventually recover strongly; it absolutely can, but it does mean investors are being asked to buy into a future recovery that hasn't yet begun to materialize.
Amazon May Actually Be the Cheaper Stock
From a valuation perspective, the comparison becomes particularly interesting. Amazon currently trades with a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 32, noticeably higher than Alibaba’s 27. At first glance, that gap might appear meaningful enough to make Alibaba look like a real value opportunity, especially considering Amazon’s 30% rally in recent weeks.
Looks can be deceiving, however, and reality is arguably the opposite. Given that those P/E ratios aren’t massively different, investors should logically want to own the company that’s executing better, growing faster, and operating from a position of greater strategic strength. There’s no question that, right now, that company is Amazon.
It has stronger momentum and significantly stronger investor sentiment. Alibaba, on the other hand, still has to prove it can fully reignite its growth while simultaneously overcoming lingering skepticism around China and broader execution concerns.
Sure, Amazon might look more expensive on a valuation basis alone. Still, in reality, investors are being asked to pay a fairly modest premium for a company that’s operating at a demonstrably higher level.
Until Alibaba starts showing the kind of consistent execution Amazon delivers quarter after quarter, the supposedly more “expensive” stock should continue to look like the much safer bet.
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The article "Amazon vs. Alibaba: One Is Clearly The Better Value Play right Now" first appeared on MarketBeat.
