Alibaba, a Chinese multinational tech company that specializes in e-commerce, retail, and the internet, has recently introduced a number of new cloud computing products as the company looks forward to expanding across the Asian continent. Cloud computing has always been regarded as the key driver of profits for Alibaba over the long term and for the past couple of years, it has been boosting its presence aggressively outside of China.
The Chinese e-commerce company has recently made an announcement to launch a new data center in the Philippines before this year ends and also opened a third data center in Indonesia. By expanding these data centers across several places will allow the cloud providers to boost their capacity in certain countries or regions.
The concept of live-stream shopping which involves a host talking and spreading awareness about products that customers can buy directly via live broadcast is hyping up, especially in China, and also can be observed in other parts of Asia.
Alibaba is in hopes that a product like this can help it stand out from the rest of the other among its U.S. rivals, including Microsoft and Amazon who are also in the cloud market.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba was the biggest public cloud market vendor at the end of 2020 with a 19.2% share, according to IDC, boosted by success in China. Amazon was second with a 10.5% share. Nevertheless, when considering the global market, Alibaba still lags behind Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
The company’s announcement regarding cloud computing came out after it reported its first net loss as a public company in the January to March quarter. The company was hit with a massive $2.8 billion fine as a result of an anti-monopoly investigation by Chinese authorities.
Maggie Wu, Alibaba’s CFO, said the company would invest “incremental profits and additional capital” in “new businesses and key strategic areas” in its current fiscal year.
In China, Alibaba faces growing competition from other technology giants including Huawei and Tencent which more recently have stepped up their cloud computing investments.
