(Yicai Global) May 17 -- The cloud service providers of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings and the world’s biggest telecoms carrier China Mobile followed Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group Holding, in saying they will slash the prices of some products.

Tencent Cloud will lower the cost of cloud servers in some regions by as much as 40 percent and that of database products by 25 percent from June 1, it said on WeChat yesterday. The company will provide small and medium-sized businesses with free cloud hosting, its safe and basic version, it noted.

China Mobile Cloud will trim the fees for its general-purpose entry-level cloud hosting and general-purpose network optimizing cloud hosting by 60 percent from today, it said yesterday. The cost of its cloud security center and cloud hard disk backup will be halved, the company added.

The reductions are on offer until the end of this month and customers can also get vouchers, China Mobile Cloud told Yicai Global today.

On April 26, Alibaba Cloud announced that it would lower the prices of its core products by between 15 percent and half, with the largest cuts for storage products.

Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, China Telecom-backed Tianyi Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Amazon Web Services led China’s infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud service market in the second half of last year, data from market researcher IDC showed.

Tencent Cloud’s market share shrank to 9.9 percent in the six months ended Dec. 31 from 11.1 percent in the first half of 2022, dropping from second to fourth place. Alibaba Cloud remained on top but lost some of its market share, slipping 4.8 points to 31.9 percent.

According to analysts, the changes in market shares were the result of cloud service providers handling some local government-backed Covid-19 control projects during the pandemic.

Industry insiders pointed out that recent advances in artificial intelligence also prompted the price cuts, with customers generally demanding greater computing power, so cloud service providers have stepped up their efforts in cloud computing and large models, changing the competitive landscape.

Editor: Martin Kadiev