Dive Brief:
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Alibaba cloud computing fiscal Q1 revenue grew 96% year-over-year to $359 million U.S., according to its parent company Alibaba Group Holding Limited, which announced its financial results on Thursday for the quarter ending on June 30, 2017.
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The company also reached one million paying customers for its cloud services, an increase of 137,000 from the previous quarter. Alibaba's current enterprise customer base spans across industries — health, finance, manufacturing and retail, according to the report.
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Alibaba attributed at least some of the cloud growth to several new products that allow companies to more easily migrate their data to cloud services, including Cloud Storage Gateway a system designed to integrate on-premise data with the Alibaba cloud, a current trend in cloud migration.
Dive Insight:
Like its U.S. cloud peers, Alibaba is seeing huge demand for cloud services, and the company’s cloud business is growing at a speed on par with U.S. companies. Microsoft Azure grew 97% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2017, AWS grew 42% during the same period, and Google boasted 92% growth.
The company’s continued cloud success will likely further spur its global expansion efforts. So far, Alibaba has focused its cloud business primarily on China and parts of Europe. But recently, the company has made moves that indicate it has broader global ambitions.
Last quarter, Alibaba announced plans to build two new data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia. This gives the company’s cloud business a global presence in 14 countries and regions.
Along with Thursday’s earnings announcement, Alibaba executives reiterated that market expansion is the company’s top priority. Experts say efforts to scale globally will eventually put Alibaba in direct competition among U.S.-based hyperscale cloud providers. Leading U.S. cloud providers could soon find major competition not amongst themselves, but from foreign countries.
