Alibaba leads Chinese tech stocks higher, says 'huge' Taobao investments coming
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Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) shares led Chinese technology stocks higher in pre-market trading on Monday as the tech giant said it would make "huge" investments in its Taobao shopping platform.
"We will make huge, historic investments to scale up the user base for the benefit of merchants," Trudy Dai, the CEO of Taobao Tmall Commerce Group, said at a conference last week and published by the company on Monday, according to Bloomberg.
"We will drive content creation in all areas, with much larger investment in content than ever before," Dai added.
Alibaba (BABA) gained nearly 2% in pre-market trading on Monday, while Baidu (BIDU), Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY), Pinduoduo (PDD) and JD.com (JD) all rose a similar amount.
Smaller Chinese tech stocks such as Bilibilii (BILI), Kingsoft Cloud Holdings (KC) and NetEase (NTES) also gained ground in pre-market trading on Monday, led by a 2.8% gain for NetEase.
The KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF (KWEB) was also higher in pre-market trading, gaining more than 2.5%.
Alibaba (BABA) is slated to report first-quarter results on May 18 and a consensus of analysts estimate the company will earn $1.36 per share on $30.19B in revenue.
In March, Alibaba (BABA) said it would split into six different units with a goal of boosting each group's individual business value, including its Taobao Tmall Business.
Following the March announcement, Barclay's analyst Jiong Shao said Alibaba's (BABA) six-way split-up plan was "a significant step towards shareholder value creation." 
"We had been hoping Alibaba would spin off certain highly valuable [subsidiaries]," Shao said. "But this master plan to split the company into six units may be even better."
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