Pandemic boosts Alibaba Cloud's Philippine ambitions

MANILA, Philippines — Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is grabbing on a business opportunity that the health crisis had brought to the fore: the need for a speedy digital transformation of Filipino businesses.

For Alibaba Cloud, the biggest cloud service provider in China by market share, the outbreak has proven to be a rainmaker. In the Philippines alone, the company has set to assist 5,000 domestic enterprises on their digital migration by end-2023. 

"The Philippines is an important market for us and we will continue to bring our best products and solutions to power local companies’ transformation needs," Lancelot Guo, president of ecosystem and sales operations at Alibaba Cloud, said in an emailed statement.

"We will continue our efforts in building and growing our local presence here," he added.

At present, the Alibaba unit has local partners from various industries such as retail, fintech, media, information communications technology, business process outsourcing, healthcare and education. 

To achieve its goals in the Philippines and Asia Pacific, the company previously announced a $283 million investment this year. Recently, Alibaba's cloud division launched a series of training programs in the country that seeks to train 50,000 and certify at least 10,000 IT professionals within the next three years.

“Philippines customers will benefit more from small and medium partners, who have a better affinity and intuition of what they need, especially post the pandemic where digitalization needs to take place rapidly," Allen Guo, country general manager at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in a statement on Thursday.

"We are not only working with these partners, we are also empowering them with our know-hows drawn from our global experience,” he added. — Ian Nicolas Cigaral