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Chinese cloud providers account for 40 per cent share of the public cloud market in Asia Pacific (APAC), spearheaded by Alibaba, Tencent and Sinnet.
That’s according to new first quarter findings from Synergy Research Group, which positions Alibaba as second behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the regional cloud market, with Tencent in fourth place behind Microsoft, and Sinnet placed sixth behind Google Cloud.
Sinnet operates and provides services from AWS China, following an agreement in November 2017 amounting to around US$300 million.
“While China remains a very tough proposition for the world’s largest cloud providers, who are all US-headquartered firms, the Chinese cloud providers are riding on the back of huge growth in their local cloud market,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
Despite AWS maintaining a leadership position across the wider market, Dinsdale said that Alibaba, Tencent and Sinnet are all “firmly entrenched” in the regional leadership table, while Baidu lies just outside the top six.
“The strong showing of the Chinese companies is thanks primarily to their standing in their home market,” Dinsdale explained. “Outside of the US, China is unique in that it is the only country whose cloud market is totally dominated by local companies.”
Dinsdale said the top six in China are all local cloud providers, with Huawei and Kingsoft also featuring in the top ten.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the APAC region the top three vendors mirror the worldwide leadership ranking of AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
Credit: Synergy Research Group “But the Chinese firms are making an impact here too,” Dinsdale added.
Specifically, Dinsdale said Alibaba has “firmly established” itself in several APAC countries and is now the fourth largest public cloud provider in the APAC-excluding-China region, with Tencent also starting to move beyond its home market.
“Language, cultural and business barriers will cause some of those Chinese companies to remain tightly focused on their home market, but others are determined to become major players on the global stage,” Dinsdale said. “Putting China to one side, in the rest of the world Alibaba is already the seventh largest player in public IaaS and PaaS markets.”
From a technological standpoint, public IaaS and PaaS are the most prominent segments of the cloud infrastructure services market, accounting for the bulk of the revenues, with the balance coming from managed or hosted private cloud services.
Within public cloud, Dinsdale said APAC does not yet account for a third of the worldwide market but it is growing "much more rapidly" than either the North American or EMEA regional markets.
Delving deeper within this region, China represents "by far" the largest country market and is also growing much faster than the rest of the region, added Dinsdale.
