Alibaba Cloud revenue grew 93 percent year over year to $710 million, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang reported in its fiscal first quarter 2019 earnings call with investors.
Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, a Chinese multi-national e-commerce, retail, and technology company, that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its core business is in Chinese retail and commerce, with a revenue of about $10 billion in the first quarter. Alibaba Group CFO Maggie Wu said that both its China e-commerce retail business and Alibaba Cloud led to robust revenue growth of 61 percent year over year.
Alibaba’s cloud business is quickly gaining progress on the other major public cloud players. According to a recent Synergy Research report, Alibaba Cloud surpassed IBM, snagging the No. 4 ranking in worldwide cloud infrastructure. This puts Alibaba in direct competition with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — all trailing Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has a strong hold on its No. 1 spot.
In its most recent earnings, Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenue grew 53 percent year over year, reaching $6.9 billion, and its intelligent cloud business grew 23 percent from the previous year, reaching $9.6 billion in the quarter. Synergy ranked Microsoft as the No. 2 vendor in every region, except China where Alibaba holds the position.
Google parent company Alphabet lumps its cloud earnings into “other revenue.” And in its most recent earnings it said this grew to $4.4 billion, a 37-percent year-over-year increase fueled by Google Cloud, Play, and hardware.
Alibaba has continued to boost its cloud portfolio, adding more than 660 products and features during the most recent quarter. This included language-based document and analysis tools, hybrid disaster recovery services, and analytics tools. While the company maintains a strong position in China, it has been making bolder moves to expand its global presence, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Last week at its Alibaba Cloud Summit Infinity 2018, it launched nine products for its global business as the company surges outside of the Chinese market. It also expanded its partnerships including one with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). HPE will offer Alibaba Cloud’s hybrid cloud stack on its Asia-Pacific infrastructure.
