(Photo credit: Alibaba Fan Boy)

Internet retail giant, Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) , is scheduled to report fiscal Q1 2016 earnings before tomorrow's open. Currently, the Estimize community is looking for EPS of $0.62 vs. Wall Street's estimate of $0.59. This would imply a year-over-year growth decline of 26%, after eight consecutive quarters of 26% growth or better, likely driven by an increase in spending as the company looks to expand beyond retail and internationally as well. Revenues however have an Estimize consensus of $3.42B, slightly better than the Street's $3.36B, indicating a healthier growth rate of 35%.

It's almost been one full year since the company IPO'd last September, and after reaching a stock price of $119.15 in the following months, shares have since plunged 35%. One of the main concerns this quarter is whether Alibaba can withstand the turmoil in the Chinese economy, which has been slowing for sometime, but hit a fever pitch last month with the bursting of the equity bubble. It's likely that decelerating growth in China will have less of an impact on e-commerce names like Alibaba, however, the company has been making a play in the brick-and-mortar space lately, acquiring two physical retailers – Suning and Intime Retail – in the last year.

The retailer has also been making a play in high growth areas such as social networking, mobile gaming and cloud computing. Just last month the company committed to investing $1B into its cloud computing segment, with it's Aliyun service opening a its first US data center, with plans to expand in the Middle East , Europe and Asia. The push into the cloud space was prompted by Amazon's success in the business, as Alibaba looks to steal market share.

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BABA data by YCharts