Huawei, Alibaba, JD.com turn to live streaming to sell cloud services, as Chinese cloud price war intensifies

Chinese cloud service giants have turned to live streaming to promote and sell their products, a move that signals an intensified price war aimed at luring small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) clients.

Huawei Technologies was the first, conducting six sessions that kicked off on March 22 and ended Tuesday, on the theme of helping “enterprises grow fast”. The live streaming was part of a “cloud purchase festival” in which Huawei was offering as much as 90 per cent off its services, according to Huawei’s official website.

The cloud units of e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com both ran live-broadcasts on Sunday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Alibaba’s session was hosted by internet celebrity Luo Yonghao, an English teacher-turned entrepreneur who is now a popular live-streamer on China’s biggest short video platform Douyin, after his smartphone brand Smartisan ran into financial trouble in 2018. A year later, ByteDance, the owner of Douyin and its overseas version TikTok, acquired some Smartisan patents for educational devices.

The live session, dubbed “the lowest prices all over the internet”, attracted more than 2.3 million viewers and saw over 1,000 firms sign up for cloud services, according to data provided by Alibaba Cloud.

JD Cloud also focused on pricing during its live session, which promised to compensate buyers if they find the same product cheaper on other online platforms.

All three cloud operators said their lower-budget offerings can benefit SMEs wanting to launch an app or website, as well as providing data storage, among other benefits.