File photo/NBD

A few years has passed since the last price war among cloud computing vendors. 

Being first to cut prices this time, Alibaba Cloud announced the largest price reduction in history at the end of April. 

On May 16th, according to Alibaba Cloud's official WeChat account, since announcing the price reduction and free trial of core cloud products last month, more than one million people have visited Alibaba Cloud's official website for free trials. Meng Jinyu, the head of Alibaba Cloud's developer business, revealed that the free trial range will be further expanded in the future.

With the behemoth starting the game, the market anxiously awaits more participants.

On the evening of May 16th, Tencent Cloud took actions, and e-Cloud followed, being the first carrier to follow suit in reducing prices. Huawei Cloud and China Telecom's eSurfing Cloud have not yet taken action. 

On May 17th, China Mobile said to National Business Daily that the discount for e-Cloud products is time-limited, and the coupon is available from May 17th to May 30th, valid for 90 days.

From the three companies' price reductions, hardware products such as hosts and servers are the main products for price reductions. In comparison, the price reduction for gateways and data is smaller. It is worth emphasizing that small and medium-sized enterprise customers are the larger beneficiaries of the price reduction trend so far.

Many industry insiders do not think that demand is the only reason for this price reduction. In the view of Zhang Xiaorong, dean of the DeepTech Research Institute, there are three reasons behind the price war. First, the slow growth of the cloud computing market, intensified competition, coupled with a long-term lack of innovation in the industry, product and service homogenization make the price the only consideration.

Second, the market is sluggish. "In the past two years, top cloud computing vendors has lost ground, and the penetration into the government and enterprise markets has been weak, so they have to resort to the price war to fight back."

Third, parent companies of the top cloud vendors plan to split, and the cloud computing business has the conditions for listing. In order to improve IPO valuations, they need to quickly improve performance and exchange market share for price.