Yusko and Rivers both compared the company to Facebook, another Internet giant that similarly struggled to turn its large customer base into financial gains, particularly as many people migrated from desktops and laptops to their mobile phones.

Facebook shares struggled for more than a year after their 2012 IPO. It now trades at more than double its IPO price of $38 a share.

Headed into earnings, options trading in Alibaba was largely dominated by bullish call bets, but bearish put activity was stronger on Thursday. Bets on the shares dropping to $85 by March 20 were among the busiest of the company's options on Thursday, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Alibaba's mobile monthly active users nearly doubled from the same quarter the previous year to 265 million. Sales through mobile devices, which typically have lower margins, accounted for a bigger slice of total sales than in the previous quarter.

"We have to work through that growing pains period of that transition" to mobile, Rivers said.

While China's growth is slowing, the world's second-biggest economy is still expanding at rates far faster than the developed world. The country's economy grew 7.4 percent last year, slightly below the government's 7.5 percent target.

That's more than triple the 2.4 percent pace the International Monetary Fund estimates the United States registered in 2014.

"Chinese Internet consumption is still a great story; the company is still gaining new buyers and is growing really fast in lower-tier cities. There are many things that are going right," said Di Zhou, associate portfolio manager for the Thornburg International Value Fund, which owned 4.7 million shares of the stock at the end of September.

Zhou declined to comment on whether the fund is currently active in the shares, but said she still likes the company.

"From our perspective, it's more of an issue of short-term pain than something fundamentally wrong that won't come back," she said.