Alibaba's (BABA) Coronavirus Tool To Combat Fears In Europe

Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is making every effort to help society in combatting the coronavirus pandemic on the back of its innovative technologies. The company’s latest move of presenting its cloud-based coronavirus diagnostic tool to the European health systems is a testament to the same.

We note that the tool is a Machine Learning (ML) based software that helps in chest scans. Further, the software was developed at the company’s Damo research center and has been tested successfully in Chinese hospital on 5,000 patients.

Alibaba strives to manage this pandemic situation with this diagnostic tool by accelerating the testing process. The tool is reportedly well-equipped to diagnose COVID-19 quickly with 96% accuracy.

Notably, the company has already offered the underlined tool to the healthcare representatives in France and Italy.

With the latest effort, the company is aiming to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus further in Europe, which has now become the epicenter of the outbreak.

Moreover, the tool is likely to help the European hospitals and other healthcare centers, which are currently overwhelmed with positive COVID-19 cases and suspects.

We believe the latest effort of Alibaba remains a major positive in this coronavirus-induced global crisis. This is likely to instill investor optimism in the stock.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited Price and Consensus

Alibaba Group Holding Limited Price and Consensus

Alibaba Group Holding Limited price-consensus-chart | Alibaba Group Holding Limited Quote

Alibaba Joins the Pack

Alibaba joins the pack of technology companies including Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) , Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) , which are taking strong measures to help government and people efficiently manage this pandemic situation.

Notably, Alphabet’s health-care division called Verily has recently launched COVID-19 screening and testing website under Project Baseline.

This particular site offers screening and potential free testing of coronavirus. The website requires users to begin with the eligibility questionnaire. Further, it asks users regarding the person willing to take the test, sign a COVID-19 Public Health authorization form that allows Verily to collect their information required for the screening process.

This is expected to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. Reportedly, Verily has successfully conducted tests for around 20 people on the very first day of COVID-19 screening.

Meanwhile, Baidu has allowed access to its Linearfold algorithm to the scientific and medical teams for the secondary structure prediction of Covid-19 RNA sequence.

Microsoft has unveiled a COVID-19 tracker tool that offers up-to-date infection statistics of each affected country on the tracker. Moreover, the tool provides access to various coronavirus related articles and other information.

We note that competition is intensifying among the tech companies in managing and preventing the society from the virus on the heels of their robust technologies.

Alibaba’s Strong Technical Endeavors

Nevertheless, Alibaba’s growing technology-based initiatives to fight against coronavirus remain noteworthy.

Apart from the latest move, the company’s affiliate Ant Financial recently announced plans to bring third-party vendors on its mobile payment platform called Alipay. It intends to offer retail, food-delivery, hotel bookings and healthcare-related services with the help of these vendors on Alipay.

The plan bodes well for the company under the current challenging scenario as people are going under house arrest, which is leading to increased adoption of apps and Internet-based services.

Additionally, Alibaba successfully encouraged developers to create mini-programs for the third-party vendors, devising 181 of those on Alipay during the coronavirus outbreak. Further, delivery services were introduced recently on Alipay by one of the vendors during this period.

This initiative reflects the company’s customer-centric approach and is likely to create additional values for user during this pandemic situation.

Currently, Alibaba carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Today's Best Stocks from Zacks

Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2019, while the S&P 500 gained and impressive +53.6%, five of our strategies returned +65.8%, +97.1%, +118.0%, +175.7% and even +186.7%.

This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 – 2019, while the S&P averaged +6.0% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +54.7% per year.

See their latest picks free >>