I will follow up if you reduce the price, and I will compare the price with you with the "cloud", and Alibaba Cloud's strategy will be learned by competitors at the "pixel level". On April 1, Alibaba Cloud disclosed the report card of Lao Luo's "cloud" the night before: more than 2.3 million people watched it, and thousands of companies placed orders to buy Alibaba Cloud products on the spot. Echoing this live broadcast is Alibaba Cloud's profit-making activity of cutting prices across the board one month ago.
In 2023, the same Alibaba Cloud will set off a price war, and the entire industry will be fighting openly and secretly for months. In 2024, there are not many cloud computing vendors that shout out price comparison and price reduction in a high-profile manner, and the targeted price comparison and live broadcast with "cloud" launched by JD Cloud are more prominent. From the official website to the live broadcast room, from the server to the object storage, there is no sign of the cloud computing price war in 2024.
Landing and disembarking
On the second day after Alibaba Cloud shouted out "Lao Luo's first live broadcast to sell cloud products, Alibaba Cloud's whole network floor price exploded cloud products", JD Cloud officially released the "Spring Breeze Plan" and set up a "1 billion price comparison gold". On the evening of March 31, while Luo Yonghao brought "cloud" in the live broadcast room of Make a Friend, JD Cloud also sold cloud products in the live broadcast room, and the background of "1 billion price comparison, make a real friend" is very eye-catching.
From the point of view of time, JD Cloud took the lead, and from 19:00 to 20:20, it always focused on one thing: price comparison, first laid the groundwork with "what can you buy with three pieces of eight" at the beginning, and then asked and answered "three pieces of eight buy JD Cloud lightweight cloud hosts, buy expensive and pay for them, 2G+40G hard disk, 3M bandwidth to send 200G traffic, as low as 3.8 yuan in 1 month".
On the other hand, Luo Yonghao first introduced Alibaba Cloud Cloud Server ECS economy e instance and general computing power u1 instance at 19:45-20:16, and then explained object storage OSS, Alibaba Cloud Disk Enterprise EditionCDE, and also demonstrated Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen with his partner. According to the configuration and price list given in the Make a Friend live broadcast room, Alibaba Cloud ECS Economical E instance, 40G ESSD Entry cloud disk, 3M fixed bandwidth unlimited traffic, and the new purchase price of Lao Luo's live broadcast room is 99 yuan/year, which is equivalent to 0.63% off.
For this price, Luo Yonghao's description is, "Is it too much, falling below the reserve price of Alibaba Cloud." Send this price to your company's IT department, and their first reaction will be that we are scammers."
According to the information compiled by JD Cloud, the prices of JD Cloud's two virtual machines are 10% and 11% lower than those of Alibaba Cloud respectively, and the price of 1TB of nationwide object storage products is 15% less than that of Alibaba Cloud.
"From the perspective of live broadcast sales, JD Cloud's price comparison strategy may attract more price-sensitive users," Guo Tao, an angel investor, told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily.
Continue to compare prices
In fact, price comparison is JD.com's traditional way of playing.
In mid-April 2023, Alibaba Cloud began a series of price cuts, and in the second half of the year, the prices of core products were lowered by 15%-50% across the board, and storage products were reduced by up to 50%. In the following month, JD Cloud "responds" and promises to "pay for the expensive purchase", according to the rules at that time, the customer selects the products and configurations on the relevant product pages of the official website of JD Cloud for comparison as needed, and in the same billing cycle, if the price is higher than the official website list price of the benchmark product of the specific cloud vendor, JD Cloud will settle the product configuration at the lowest price after comparison with the specific cloud vendor. Price comparison targets include Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud.
In 2024, JD Cloud will continue. On the morning of February 29, Alibaba Cloud announced an average price reduction of 20% for more than 100 core products. In the evening, JD Cloud announced that it would start a price comparison activity for specific cloud service providers from the next day, and said that "we will continue to compare prices on the whole network! Break down the low price! Lower by 10%".
Regarding JD Cloud's price comparison and live broadcast selling "cloud", Alibaba Cloud related people remained silent.
"Cloud computing follows Moore's Law, and in the case of reduced computing power costs and network costs, cloud computing price reduction is a trend", Wang Chao, founder of Wenyuan Think Tank, believes that cloud computing price reduction will be the norm. Liu Weiguang, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud, also said, "Every time cloud computing experiences a period of technology accumulation, it will produce new scale effects and new technology dividends."
After Alibaba Cloud cut prices in 2023, Tencent Cloud, JD Cloud, and Mobile Cloud followed up, with large price reductions and many vendors involved. At present, major cloud vendors also have preferential activities, such as HUAWEI CLOUD is in the "New Year's Purchase 10,000 Years Gift Package" activity, which will be held from February 28th to April 15th, mainly focusing on full discounts; Tencent Cloud's homepage is displaying the "Selected Special Offers, Worry-free Use of Cloud" activity, focusing on 2-core 2G4M cloud servers for new and old users to enjoy 99 yuan/year, and the same price for renewal; Mobile Cloud offers from January 1st to June 30th, including cloud computers, cloud space, and cloud hosts; Baidu Intelligent Cloud's official website is undergoing a "direct drop of 100 products". up to 60%" campaign.
You retreat and I advance
"From a competitive point of view, the cloud computing price war in 2024 will be more restrained," Guo said.
"We don't feel the price war obviously. An employee of a middle-waist cloud computing manufacturer told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily, "The best form of price reduction is to distribute scale dividends to more customers, rather than malicious price wars." Alibaba Cloud is the largest cloud service provider in China, and it must have scale dividends, mainly depending on whether the scale dividend can cover the loss of price reduction, otherwise it is not good for the industry and its sustainable development. ”
Alibaba's latest financial report shows that Alibaba Cloud's revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 28.066 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3%, and its adjusted EBITA profit was 2.364 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 86%, echoing Alibaba Cloud's strategy of reducing project-based contract revenue with lower profit margins. According to data disclosed by Baidu CEO Robin Li, the total revenue of Baidu Intelligence in the fourth quarter of 2023 will be 8.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 61.5%.
In another dimension, the fourth quarter report of 2023 disclosed by Canalys shows that Alibaba Cloud ranks first in cloud infrastructure service spending in Chinese mainland with a market share of 39%, and Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud rank second and third respectively, accounting for 19% and 16% of the corresponding market.
"In 2023, HUAWEI CLOUD has maintained double-digit growth in four quarters, and Tencent Cloud has gradually moved out of the profit optimization cycle in the second half of the year, showing signs of revenue growth. Alibaba Cloud, on the other hand, is facing challenges and its growth momentum is weak. One potential factor is that Alibaba Cloud has frequently restructured its organization over the past year," Canalys said in the report.
Returning to the gunpowder-flavored live broadcast belt "cloud", Alibaba Cloud said that the cooperation with Luo Yonghao aims to popularize the value of cloud computing to a wider range of people, so that more enterprises can use advanced public cloud services. Luo Yonghao sold clouds for the first time in the Taobao live broadcast room. It attracted more than 2.3 million viewers, and thousands of enterprises placed orders to purchase Alibaba Cloud products on the spot.
According to the order process in the live broadcast room shared by a relevant person from Alibaba Cloud on March 31, "the user bought a redemption code in the live broadcast room, and needs to log in to the official website of Alibaba Cloud to redeem it, and the redemption code is valid for one month", but the person did not disclose the number of orders that have been redeemed to a reporter from Beijing Business Daily.
Beijing Business Daily reporter Wei Wei
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