Alibaba Leads Asia’s Cloud Market Outshining Amazon and Microsoft

Alibaba, a China-based e-commerce giant, is one of the leading providers of e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. The company's cloud computing subsidiary, Alibaba Cloud, led the Asia Pacific market with a market share of 19.6 percent in 2018, and at the top of the market in Asia, and leading in China with cloud revenue up 66 percent year-over-year. Following Amazon's AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud is dominating the Asia region with a market share of 28.2 percent in 2019, making the company a leading cloud computing provider in the region.

Considering a report, globally, the cloud infrastructure services spending grew 37 percent to US$30 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the market during the same period, accounting for 32 percent of total spending. Conversely, Microsoft Azure increased its share from 15 percent in 2018 to 18 percent in Q4 2019, while Google Cloud was the third largest cloud service provider with a market share of 6 percent, followed by Alibaba Cloud with 5 percent.

While AWS has a third of the total market share of the cloud globally, Alibaba is holding a whopping 47.3 percent of China's cloud computing market share, followed by its competitor Tencent Cloud with 15.4 percent. In China, AWS comes at third holding 8.8 percent of the cloud market share, according to Canalys research. This indicates that Alibaba is clearly in the lead with the biggest market share in the region and now hoping to lead in the global market.

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Jess Zhang said, "We look forward to continuing our work, which enables our global customers and partners to expedite their digital transformation journeys through our scalable, robust, and secure infrastructure, advanced analytics capabilities, and thriving ecosystem."

In the Asia Pacific region, Alibaba's cloud computing and data intelligence wing have set the company's market position at the top in Infrastructure as a Service and Infrastructure Utility Services market in 2018 with a 4.7 percent annual market share growth, a Gartner report noted. The company's cloud division, which dominated the region with a 19.6 percent market share during the same year, had earned more than global industry leaders Amazon and Microsoft cumulatively, according to the research firm.

The expenditure in the cloud market in 2019 exceeded US$107 billion, up from US$78 billion in 2018. It is also predicted that cloud infrastructure services spending will grow 32 percent to US$141 billion in 2020 and US$284 billion in 2024.

Moreover, in mid-April 2020, Alibaba said it would invest 200 billion yuan (US$28.26 billion) in its cloud computing division over the next three years. According to the company, the money will be used to invest in infrastructure and technologies related to operating systems, servers, chips and networks. Currently, Alibaba Cloud operates in 15 local data centers outside mainland China, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, India, and Japan.