Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) is scheduled to release its fiscal fourth-quarter financial results Thursday before the markets open. Thomson Reuters has consensus estimates of $0.42 in earnings per share (EPS) on $2.78 billion in revenue. In the fourth quarter of last year, when Alibaba was not public, it had $1.94 billion in revenue.

After the previous earnings report and guidance, 24/7 Wall St. could not help but to ask whether it was fair to think that Alibaba duped Wall Street analysts and investors into thinking its growth rates were higher.

One recent concern may be that the Chinese online retail giant is in the midst of a hiring freeze. CEO Jack Ma even reportedly said that the company has grown much too quickly.

There are also concerns from some that Alibaba has been trying to play more fairly by clamping down on knock-off and counterfeit goods sold through its networks. That is a welcome sign for buyers and for companies with brands that want to be protected, but the reality is that policing sellers costs money — and it may even thwart some of the lower-end sales, hurting Alibaba revenues.

Another concern from investors is that they really do not have a firm grasp on what Alibaba is. Overall, Investors should be concerned about their position going into these earnings. Alibaba’s stock has been slowly trending downward since the stock hit its high back in November. Even as recent as Tuesday, shares hit their all-time low and are just above that point going into earnings.

Alibaba needs to turn this trend around. If there was a good time to start it would be with this earnings report.

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For the good things to consider: It often gets lost just what a large global footprint that is owned by Alibaba. The company claims more active users than the entire U.S. population. Still, this massive number represents barely a quarter of China’s population. There is still a lot of unharnessed growth for Alibaba to capture if it can figure out how to get China’s vast number of mobile users to shop from their phones — and if it can get anywhere close to earning on mobile users what it does on desktop users.

Shares of Alibaba were up 0.3% at $79.78 Wednesday, in a post IPO trading range of $77.77 to $120.00. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $106.61.

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