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| Cloud growth in Alibaba Cloud outperforms Amazon and Microsoft |
In the quarter ending in September, Alibaba's cloud businesses grew faster than those of Amazon and Microsoft, and the Chinese tech giant reiterated its commitment to making the division profitable by March next year.
Alibaba reported that cloud computing sales totaled 14.89 billion yuan ($ 2.24 billion) for the three months ending September 30.
This corresponds to an annual growth of 60%, which is the fastest growth rate since the December 2019 quarter.
That's faster than AWS revenue growth of 29% year-over-year in Amazon and Microsoft Azure quarter-on-quarter revenue growth of 48%.
It should be noted that Alibaba's cloud computing business is much smaller than that of the market leaders, Amazon and Microsoft.
In contrast, AWS generated $ 11.6 billion in sales with Amazon, while Microsoft's smart cloud sales (including non-Azure products) totaled $ 13 billion in the September quarter.
Alibaba is the fourth largest provider of public cloud computing in the world, according to a survey by the Synergy Research Group.
Daniel Chang, CEO of Alibaba, said the public sector and financial services are the fastest growing companies in the cloud computing industry.
He added: "We believe that cloud computing is the backbone of the infrastructure of the digital age, but it is still in the early stages of growth and we are determined to increase investment in cloud computing."
Alibaba Chief Financial Officer (Maggie Wu) said in September that the company's cloud computing business is expected to be profitable for the first time in the current fiscal year, which begins in April 2020 and ends on the 31st. March 2021.
In the September quarter, Alibaba Cloud's cloud computing business lost 3.79 billion yuan, much more than 1.92 billion yuan in the same period last year.
Alibaba CFO said: We expect to be profitable in the next two quarters and have no reason to believe that our cloud computing business will not achieve the profitability levels we see in other companies. Comparable, and we will continue to focus on our expansion. Pioneering position in the cloud computing market and increasing profits.