At home and abroad, Alibaba Cloud is stuck

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Editor's note: Alibaba Cloud is the world’s third largest cloud infrastructure company and the biggest in the Asia-Pacific region by revenue, according to research firm Gartner. It falls to No. 4 when counting total cloud infrastructure and platform as a service revenue, behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Like AWS was created within Amazon.com Inc., Alibaba Cloud was born out of the Alibaba Group’s need to operate its core e-commerce business at a massive scale. It essentially forms the digital technology and intelligence backbone of the group. Founded in 2009, the cloud division also makes these technologies available to third-party customers, aiming to replicate AWS’s success as one of Amazon’s most profitable divisions. Since AWS does not operate at scale in China (the cloud-computing industry in China is restricted and overseas cloud providers need to form joint ventures to operate in the country), the Chinese cloud market is led by Alibaba Cloud with a 40% market share, followed by Tencent Cloud (and vendors like Huawei Cloud, Kingsoft Cloud, UCloud and Tianyi Cloud making up a long tail). That said, …