Chinese-headquartered eCommerce giant Alibaba is going up against Amazon, offering new cloud computing services and livestream shopping as it looks to expand across Asia, CNBC reported on Tuesday (June 8).
Alibaba’s new data center in the Philippines is in the works and expected to launch before the end of 2021. A third data center in Indonesia also was recently introduced. By growing its base of data centers, companies like Alibaba can enhance cloud services in some locales.
The Chinese powerhouse co-founded by Jack Ma, who stepped down as its executive chair, is also rolling out a cloud-based livestream product to facilitate digital shopping. Online merchants will have the ability to integrate a livestream shopping feature on their websites or apps, CNBC reported. The new feature will be hosted on Alibaba’s cloud.
The Chinese firm is hoping its new cloud services will stand apart from U.S. competitors like Amazon and Microsoft, per CNBC.
Although Alibaba has a strong foothold in the Asia-Pacific region, it is still behind Microsoft, Amazon and Google on the global landscape. The company was, however, the largest public cloud market vendor in China by the end of last year, with a 19.2 percent market share, CNBC reported citing data from IDC. Amazon’s cloud services ranked second in the country, with a 10.5 percent share.
Alibaba indicated in May that it is also looking into new markets after hitting 1 billion users and logging a record $1.2 trillion of gross merchandise value sales on its platforms. CFO Maggie Wu indicated that Alibaba is anticipated to generate $145 billion-plus in revenue in 2021, up about 30 percent over last year.
The company’s move into live streaming could hit a snag as China probes that market in order to protect consumers. Concerns included the possible poor quality of goods being offered and advertising that is deceptive.
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