HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) – Alibaba Group Holding raised a proposed share buyback programme by US$4 billion to US$10 billion, offering more support to shares battered by a widening antitrust investigation into the country’s most powerful internet corporations.

Its shares slid more than 5 per cent in early Hong Kong trading to a six-month low. China’s e-commerce leader said on Monday (Dec 28) it started buying back shares this quarter and its board has authorised an increase in that programme, effective for two years through the end of 2022.

Once hailed as the standard-bearers of China’s economic and technological ascendancy, Alibaba and rivals like Tencent Holdings now face increasing pressure from regulators worried about the speed with which they’re amassing hundreds of millions of users and gaining influence over almost every aspect of daily life. Alibaba’s stock is down roughly 30 per cent from its 2020 peak, battered by the deepening scrutiny and allegations of monopolistic practices at the crown jewel of billionaire Jack Ma’s empire.

Beijing kicked off an antitrust investigation into Alibaba last week and dispatched officials to its Hangzhou headquarters, marking the formal start of the Communist Party’s crackdown on the company that made Ma the country’s best-known entrepreneur. On Sunday, Chinese regulators ordered Mr Ma’s other online titan – Ant Group – to return to its roots as a provider of payments services, threatening to throttle growth in its most lucrative businesses of consumer loans and wealth management.

Mr Ma, the flamboyant co-founder of Alibaba and Ant, has all but vanished from public view since Ant’s initial public offering got derailed last month. As of early December, the man most closely identified with the meteoric rise of China Inc was advised by the government to stay in the country, a person familiar with the matter has said.

Ma isn’t on the verge of a personal downfall, those familiar with the situation have said. His very public rebuke is instead a warning Beijing has lost patience with the outsize power of its technology moguls, increasingly perceived as a threat to the political and financial stability President Xi Jinping prizes most.