Alibaba, China’s equivalent to Amazon Web Services, is lowering the price of its cloud services, but only customers in China will benefit.
Alibaba Cloud, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, is slashing the price of key IT services by up to 50%, ostensibly to gain market dominance ahead of a future IPO.
According to the firm, the price reductions will apply to various Elastic Compute Service, Object Storage Service, network, database, Content Delivery Network, and security products offered in China.
According to a spokesperson, the decision was made “in line with Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to making computing power more inclusive,” and “this large-scale price reduction is to return more technological dividends to customers and partners, to continue to reduce the cost of using the cloud and expand the market space of the cloud.”
According to Bloomberg, one of the reasons for Alibaba Cloud’s pricing cuts is that the company is losing market share to local competition.
Despite this, it is recognised as one of its parent company’s fastest-growing subsidiaries and is said to be a potential candidate for a future IPO.