We all know Alibaba mostly for its e-commerce business. But, you guys will be fascinated to know that by recording over $2 billion in revenue this quarter Alibaba crosses IBM to become the fourth-largest company in the space. It has finally been achieving the goals that it had when the company entered the cloud market in 2015. To give you a perspective, the company generated around 40% more revenue than IBM (which had a healthy $1.65 billion).
Competition in the market
Even though Alibaba crossed IBM, it has a long way to go in terms of revenue and market share. The company’s figures look very weak when we compare it to the market leaders of cloud infrastructure. Amazon being the leader, recorded $11.6 billion quarterly revenue, while Azure generated $5.9 billion. Even Google is sitting in the third position with $2.9 billion quarterly revenue.
Taking a look at the figures, Alibaba is fourth in the race now and is actually not much behind Google. In fact, the outlook and the direction of the company might soon take it third on the list. Being basically new to the field, it is still interesting to see how quickly it has caught up with the leaders.
Future of the Alibaba’s cloud division
The pandemic situation has actually boosted the business in the cloud market. The CEO of Alibaba Group said how China’s transition towards cloud infrastructure has led to their growth. The entire digitisation process of companies has also helped a lot and looking at the revenue results the growth rate also seems great.
The fact that as we slowly move forward towards complete digitisation, cloud services will become a very important aspect for every business. It will be something business would need to sustain. And even though some companies might not be on cloud servers yet, but over time they will have to make the switch. Also, even though China is the largest market for Alibaba if trade tension between the US and China resolve under Joe Biden than Alibaba is bound to enjoy great benefits from it.
As of now, the company is slowly expanding outside China and has already built many data centres. Some of the countries that currently have Alibaba’s data centres are US, US, UAE and more. According to some reports, Alibaba has 5% of the entire cloud market share and has a lot of space to grow in the future.
IBM has been in the computing field for so long, so Alibaba crossing it shows the real direction of the company. What are your thoughts on the fact that Alibaba crosses IBM? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found our content informative, do like and share it with your friends.
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