Alibaba Cloud, known in China as Aliyun, said on Wednesday that it is lowering prices by as much as 50 percent, from May 7. Aliyun’s move has been long-anticipated.
Though still the leading cloud business in China, Alibaba’s rivals are growing fast. In the second half of 2022, the IasS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PasS (Platform as a Service) businesses of China’s three major carriers – China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom – all grew more than 100 percent. Aliyun’s market share dropped from 36.7 percent to 31.9 percent, while China Telecom grew from 8.9 percent to 10.3 percent.
More than 200,000 enterprises have applied to access Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot. Large AI models are an opportunity for cloud providers to compete, and Aliyun needs more businesses. Aliyun hopes to provide businesses with a dedicated data space where they can put relevant information without pre-processing.
Over the past few years, Aliyun has adjusted its prices more than once. A price war has caused headaches for small and medium-sized players. The effect of "price adjustment" depends on the actual market situation.
