- Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding LTD, held its first livestream event on affiliated e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting millions of viewers.
- Following a series of price cuts by Alibaba Cloud last year, its rivals also slashed prices, indicating a price war between the major players.
- Alibaba Cloud said these price cuts are part of a long-term strategic approach, not a short-term competitive strategy.
Cloud live streaming attracts a large audience
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding LTD, held its first livestream event on affiliated e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting the attention of more than 2.3 million viewers. The event showcased several cloud computing solutions such as Alibaba Cloud Disk Enterprise Edition, Alibaba Cloud elastic computing service and object storage service, attracting about 1,000 enterprises to order and consult products during the live broadcast.
The partnership with Luo reportedly aims to expand the coverage and understanding of the benefits of cloud computing to a wider audience and enterprises, highlighting the importance of advanced public cloud services.
Also read: Alibaba drops Hong Kong IPO plan for logistics unit Cainiao
Long-term price war
Following a series of price cuts by Alibaba Cloud last year, rivals such as Tencent Holdings LTD, China Telecom’s State Cloud and JD.Com Inc’s JD.com Cloud also slashed prices, indicating a price war among major players.
Despite recent price cuts, including Alibaba Cloud’s 20 percent price cut for all products, Tencent Cloud chose not to follow suit this time.
Liu Weiguang, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud, stressed that these price cuts are part of a long-term strategic approach, not a short-term competitive strategy. He explained that cloud computing operates on the basis of economies of scale, and the increased customer base can significantly reduce procurement, research and development costs, and thus product pricing.
