Specialist
Former cloud expert at Alibaba Cloud
Agenda
- Public, private and hybrid cloud market in China – market size, growth trends and demand
- Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), Tencent (HKG: 0700), Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) and Huawei – competitive advantages and disadvantages in cloud business, development momentum and core competencies of Alibaba Cloud
- Alibaba Cloud’s revenue structure by client industries, growth trends, cloud cost and profit margin changes
- Alibaba Cloud’s cooperation with clients from government, transportation and 3C sectors in south China – project acquisition, implementation and order growth trends
- Alibaba Cloud’s future investment strategies, development focus and product and sales strategies
Questions
1.
Can you update us on the development trends of China’s public, private and hybrid cloud market over the last three years, highlighting IaaS and PaaS solutions? What are the most discussed or most concerned topics in the market lately? How much do you expect China’s entire cloud computing industry to grow in the next 1-3 years?
2.
Alibaba and Tencent have been the top two players in China’s public cloud market over the last three years, but the rankings behind them have been changing constantly. Can you brief us on changes in the market share of the top five players? Which players have grown faster than you expected, and which ones have grown more slowly than you expected? What are the reasons for that?
3.
Alibaba Cloud is taking the lead in China’s cloud computing industry, followed by Tencent Cloud. Ranking behind them are Huawei, Baidu and AWS. What competitive advantages does Alibaba Cloud have over other players? Do you think Alibaba Cloud can widen its gap with other players further? Or will its gap with Tencent Cloud be narrowed?
4.
Alibaba Cloud announced on 20 April that it would invest RMB 200bn more in the development of core technologies related to cloud-based operating systems, servers, chips and networks as well as the construction of data centres in the next three years. At the 2020 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said that the company would strive to consolidate its foundation, enhance its middle office and improve its ecosystem. What do you think of these two incidents? Can you interpret Alibaba Cloud’s future development strategies for us? How will it allocate the RMB 200bn investment budget?
5.
How much does the initial investment in the construction of a super data centre with 200,000 servers need?
6.
In FY20 that started from April 2019 to the end of March 2020, Alibaba Cloud’s revenue was about RMB 40bn. The YoY growth rates in the first three quarters were over 60%, but the growth rate in the last quarter was only 58%. What do you think of the decrease in the growth rate? What were the revenue proportions and growth rates of public, hybrid and private cloud solutions and those of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions?
7.
What are the revenue growth trend and growth drivers of public and private cloud solutions? What about those of IaaS and PaaS solutions? The company will probably have SaaS business such as that on DingTalk. Which segments contribute the most to the company’s development?
8.
According to a former senior executive of Tencent, the private cloud was not Tencent’s focus but Tencent planned to increase the effort in developing the private cloud and make it the second growth driver. However, Alibaba will keep focusing on the public cloud, won’t it?
9.
Large clients usually prefer hybrid or private cloud solutions, don’t they?
10.
What do you think are Alibaba Cloud’s revenue growth rates in Q2 and H2 2020? The company kept the growth rate above 60% and there were even records of over 100% in the past few years. It’s understandable that the growth may slow down given that the business scale is quite huge. What do you think will be the growth rate in the FY21?
11.
According to the EBITDA formula adjusted by Alibaba Cloud, its EBITDA margin was negative 2% last quarter and is negative 1% this quarter. Will it break even or even achieve profits soon? Earlier, you also said the platform may make heavy investments in the near future. Can you share with us its cost structure, pricing strategy and the major preconditions to achieve profits?
12.
What are the industry and cloud product demand of Alibaba Cloud’s clients? Which products do they purchase from Alibaba Cloud? How much do different clients contribute to Alibaba Cloud’s revenue? Can you compare the client structures and target clients of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud?
13.
When Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud compete for large clients, such as governments, which sales strategies do they adopt?
14.
Which cloud service providers have competitive channels for acquiring large clients? Do they strive for cloud projects through submitting bids to or exchanging resources with large clients? What are the revenue and profit of such projects?
15.
You mentioned the size of the public cloud market above. Is the revenue generated CDNs included?
16.
How much do CDNs account for of Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud revenue?
17.
You mentioned that PaaS products account for 15% of Alibaba Cloud’s revenue. How much do databases account for of the PaaS revenue?
