Following the announcement of major support measures for the economy - mainly focused on recapitalizing banks and regional governments crippled by a colossal property crisis - the surge in Chinese stock market prices tested its fifteen-year resistance ceiling.

Carried away by the euphoria triggered by the central party's announcements, Alibaba shares have also soared. In September, in just one month, it appreciated by 40%... Before giving up most of these gains and gradually falling back to its starting point.

To its credit, Alibaba is not alone in this. Its peers such as PDD, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com are also feeling the pinch, victims of a similar loss of momentum. Even more mercurial in its speculative fever than the American market, the Chinese market is giving a lesson in humility to the legions of Western hedge funds that have rushed in recently.

Our analysts, incidentally, were only half-believers. Alibaba's major restructuring projects were mysteriously abandoned one after the other. These curious setbacks came at a time when Jack Ma was also retro-pedaling, after announcing a partial sale of his stake - at a time when the stock was trading at record lows - which was inevitably poorly received by the market.

Earlier this year, Alibaba's founder posted on his blog a vibrant plea to rekindle the flame within the group. But it will take more than that to restore morale: Alibaba is still losing ground to fast-growing rivals such as Shein, PDD and ByteDance, while margins continue to erode and internal power struggles are being exposed in the Chinese press.

The Group, which at the beginning of last year was still holding almost half its market capitalization in cash and cash equivalents, has decided to go all out on returns of capital to shareholders: Over the last seven half-years, the $49 billion in accumulated free cash flow has been returned in full to shareholders - $43 billion via share buy-backs, the remaining $6 billion in dividends.

Perfectly rational on paper, this choice underlines the Group's apparent - and theoretically spectacular - discount at current valuation levels, since its enterprise value hovers around $150 billion. However, the sluggishness of the share price also betrays investors' mistrust of a group whose activities all seem - including e-commerce, cloud and logistics - to be losing momentum.

Added to these apprehensions - as is customary in China, one might say - are barely legible accounting records, an opaque offshore control structure, the slowdown of the Chinese economy and Jack Ma's previous run-ins with the political elite.