Alibaba Cloud revenue reached $1.15 billion in the company's fourth quarter of fiscal year 2019. That's a massive 76 percent jump from Q4 of 2018, according to earnings results released today.
The figure likely means Alibaba Cloud revenues are nearing parity with Google Cloud Platform -- but still trail Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, ChannelE2E believes. For its part, Google's cloud business is growing but corporate CEO Sundar Piuchai has declined to answer questions about Google Cloud revenues.
Meanwhile, Alibaba is countering Amazon's ecommerce and cloud efforts on a near-global scale. The China-based company has yet to move aggressively into the U.S. market. But anecdotal evidence suggests Alibaba Cloud is gaining a foothold in Europe. Moreover the cloud service provider is the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific, according to Gartner. Key partners include Verizon Secure Cloud.
Alibaba Cloud Expansion: Details
In fiscal year 2019, Alibaba Cloud served more than half of the A-share listed companies in China, the company says. The company's latest cloud services include:
- graph database capabilities;
- anti-bot protection;
- blockchain-as-a-service; and
- real time communications.
Much like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it sounds like Alibaba Cloud plans to compete aggressively on price. Within the company's earnings announcement today, the firm said:
"We continue to use our scale to lower the pricing of products and services in the areas of content delivery network, security, database and network infrastructure so that we are able to pass on cost savings to our customers."
Alibaba Cloud: Limited U.S. Ambitions?
Still, Alibaba has stopped short of making a major U.S. push. The company serves U.S. businesses worldwide. But the current U.S.-China trade war and concerns about data protection have so far limited Alibaba's strategy in the North American market.
