According to new figures from Synergy Research Group, although Amazon has retained its number position in the region, three of the top six are Chinese companies. These are Alibaba, Tencent and Sinnet, narrowly followed by Baidu that ranks just outside the top six. As a result, Chinese cloud providers now hold a 40% share of the APAC public cloud market.
“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, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group. “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. Putting China to one side, in the rest of the world Alibaba is already the seventh largest player in public IaaS and PaaS markets.”
The top six cloud providers in China are all local cloud providers, with Huawei and Kingsoft featuring in the top ten. As for the rest of the APAC region, Amazon, Microsoft and Google hold the top three spots in line with global leadership ranking. However, Chinese firms are making an impact; Alibaba has firmly established itself in several APAC countries and is now the fourth largest public cloud provider in the region China. While Tencent has also started to move beyond its home market.
SRG also found that public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are the most prominent segments of the cloud infrastructure services market and account for the bulk of the revenues, with the balance coming from managed or hosted private cloud services. Within public cloud, the APAC region 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. Within the APAC region, China is by far the largest country market and is also growing much faster than the rest of the region.
