Alibaba Cloud nears profitability as sales outpace US rivals

Revenue rose 60 per cent in Q3

Alibaba Cloud saw sales rocket in its Q2 as it continues to outpace the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Revenue for the period ending 30 September rocketed 60 per cent year on year to $2.2bn.

Alibaba said that its cloud computing arm is likely to become profitability in H2.

CEO Daniel Zhang said that organisations in the public sector and financial services sector made the biggest contribution to the cloud growth.

"We announced at our investor day that Alibaba Cloud is expected to turn profitable by the end of this fiscal year," he added.

"We believe cloud computing is fundamental infrastructure in the digital area, but it is still in early stage of growth.

"We are committed to further increasing our investments in cloud computing."

Alibaba's year on year growth is greater than the figures reported by AWS (29 per cent) and Microsoft Azure (48 per cent).

Google does not breakout figures for its public cloud infrastructure offering Google Cloud Platform, but it's wider cloud business saw sales rise 45 per cent.

Alibaba is however growing from a smaller base.

A recent report by analyst Canalys showed Alibaba to have six per cent of the global cloud infrastructure services market, with AWS out ahead with 32 per cent.