Alibaba Group Holding chairman Joe Tsai said the company was now “on a very good path” after overcoming a series of setbacks in the past few years, including a regulatory crackdown and geopolitical uncertainties, as the tech giant sharpens its focus on core businesses including e-commerce and artificial intelligence (AI).

“[If] you look at Alibaba for the last five years, there were a ton of setbacks,” Tsai said on Saturday in a fireside chat at the Beyond Expo in Macau. “It’s a confluence of regulatory scrutiny, crackdowns … very fierce competition.”

Increased geopolitical risks, followed by the Covid-19 pandemic, also converged at the same time around 2021, Tsai said.

During that phase Alibaba learned “to be resilient and to always think about living another day” so that it had “the opportunity to fight back”, he said.

However, Alibaba is currently “on a very good path looking forward” as it focuses on a few core businesses including e-commerce, cloud computing, as well as having AI present in every aspect of its business, both internally and for customers, according to Tsai.

Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba along with Jack Ma, also spoke about navigating what he called a “new paradigm” over the past few months, facing “trade tensions, tariffs and governments acting in a way that’s very unpredictable”.