The Alibaba logo is pictured at the company's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, July 20, 2018. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

SHANGHAI — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is emerging as one of China’s biggest corporate winners of the coronavirus crisis, gaining the opportunity to expand its businesses and solidify its status as a critical part of the country’s socio-economic engine.

While many companies are hurting from disruption caused by the virus, Alibaba has seen traffic at its online marketplaces shoot higher and demand grow for services like food delivery. Local authorities have even turned to its cloud business to build health-tracking apps.

The company, which emerged as China’s leading e-commerce company after the 2003 SARS outbreak, is now positioning itself as a hirer and a lender too, advertising for over 100,000 jobs and offering billions of dollars in loans to small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) at a time when many others are retrenching.

Alibaba has reported increases of 21 percent in quarterly revenue and 19 percent in core commerce sales, beating expectations

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 “It’s something I haven’t seen ... any other company do at that scale,” Jeff Towson, a professor of investment formerly at Peking University, said of Alibaba’s plan, announced in March, to lend US$282 billion to SMEs in 2020.

It is pattern being repeated in the United States, where technology giants Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp have been able to weather the coronavirus storm better than smaller peers and concurrently reinforce their position, not only in the market but in the fabric of society itself.

Alibaba has reported increases of 21 percent in quarterly revenue and 19 percent in core commerce sales, beating expectations. Its executives had predicted in February that the virus would cause sales to drop.

“After the virus, there’s nowhere for offline vendors to go but online,” said Josh Gardner, who operates online store fronts for overseas brands at Kung Fu Data. “Alibaba has a dominant position on JD.com except for a few electronics categories, and Pinduoduo is mainly for low-margin goods.”

Pacific Epoch analyst Steven Zhu said Alibaba’s food delivery arm Ele.me was able to catch up with dominant peer Meituan Dianping during the virus, mainly by offering discounts which both had previously pulled back on.

Ele.me’s daily active users rose to roughly 15 million from 10 million, while Meituan’s increased to 17 million from 15 million, showed data from researcher Analysys.

The company has also beefed up through laid off restaurant and retail workers. Its Kaola imported-product platform, supermarket arm Hema and Ele.me together said they have hired, or are hiring for, as many as 140,000 roles.

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Gao Daoxiang, 20, told Reuters he joined Ele.me as a driver in April when the hotpot restaurant he had worked for did not reopen after restrictions were lifted.

The virus has also been a shot in the arm for emerging business lines outside of e-commerce such as cloud-computing, where revenue grew 58 percent in January-March.

Its workplace messaging app Dingtalk saw downloads through Apple’s App Store increase over 1,000 percent in February as work and schooling shifted to home computers, showed data from SensorTower. It is now a leader in a category vied for by social media leaders Tencent and ByteDance.