Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China's e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, is speeding up its expansion in overseas markets, with revenue in Southeast Asia soaring by more than 60%, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, told the press.

At the 2021 Alibaba Investor Day held on December 16-17, Zhang said that Alibaba Cloud has upgraded its overseas organizational structure to better achieve localization as a global expansion effort.

"Cloud computing keeps growing rapidly in China and Southeast Asia, and all walks of life, including finance, public affairs, manufacturing, retail, etc, have strong demand for digitalization", Zhang said. "Cloud computing has become the core and fundamental of the digital world as more companies plan to migrate to cloud-based services."

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about changes in consumer behavior, prompting companies to seek online development, so the digitalization process in Southeast Asia has been accelerated.

Southeast Asia is now the fastest-growing adopter of cloud computing with the cloud market expected to reach $40.32 billion by 2025, according to IDC.

Alibaba Cloud had already established hundreds of cloud data centers in 25 countries and regions including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Germany, Dubai, and the US, making itself the largest cloud computing platform in Asia.

According to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud is the third largest cloud computing service provider in the world, trailing only Amazon and Microsoft, and the largest in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Its market share in the Asia-Pacific increased from 3.7% in 2016 to 9.5% in 2020, achieving five consecutive years of expansion.