China’s cloud computing sector: emerging and promising

Rong Yongkang, vice-president of Amazon AWS, delivers a keynote speech on “Trusted cloud computing technology” at a forum of Wuzhen’s ongoing World Internet Conference, on Dec 18. [Photo/CE.cn]

Software and hardware providers in China are investing huge to extend their services to the cloud computing sector, said Rong Yongkang, vice-president of Amazon AWS, at a forum of the ongoing Second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Dec 18.

IT companies are keeping a close eye on China’s small but potentially huge cloud computing sector in order to grab a big share of the market despite of the harsh reality-their investment return still remains slim.

“[They] have invested 5 billion yuan into the sector ($771 million), with a profit margin of 20 percent by the end of 2015,” said Rong at the forum themed “Reliable Cloud Computing and Big Data”.

He described that the sector is “brand new”, and that lags behind conventional IT sectors.

“It is still at an early stage, but serves as a ‘new normal’ in global IT industry,” said Rong.

Rong also mentioned that so far, most of the cloud-computing service users were Internet companies or start-ups.

“Large corporations are comparatively new comers, they are hesitated to use the new technology because of security concerns”, he added.

Both local and overseas players eager to grab market shares in the industry in China. Amazon announced to bring its cloud computing to China with the hope to level up the overall cloud computing system in the country, while Aliyun, the cloud-computing arm of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, said it will cut the price of its services by up to 35 percent in order to attract more users.