Alibaba saw its cloud sales rise in its last quarter, driven by both public and hybrid cloud adoption.
The Chinese giant’s cloud sales shot up 59 percent year on year to $1.7 billion during the quarter ending 30 June, equating to eight percent of the firm’s total revenue.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Daniel Zhang said: “The pandemic has transformed the way enterprises work, accelerating demand for cloud infrastructure and services. If you look at our revenue breakdown, obviously, cloud is enjoying a very, very fast growth and what we see is that all the industries are in the process of digital transformation.”
Alibaba remains the largest cloud provider in China, but Zhang said that analysts have pegged the US market as being much larger than in its homeland – indicating that there is still plenty of room for growth.
“To give you a global comparison of the China cloud market and the US cloud market, based on the third-party studies that we’ve seen, the China cloud market is going to be somewhere in the $15- $20 billion total size range, and the US market is about eight times that”, he said.
“So the China market is still at a very early stage and we expect, based on what we’ve seen of our customers, as well as observing the whole market growth, the China market is going to be a much faster-growing market in cloud than the US market.
“We feel very good, very comfortable, to be in the China market and just being an environment of faster digitisation and faster growth of usage of cloud from enterprises because we’re growing from such a smaller base [than in the US].”
