In the global wave of digital transformation, cloud computing stands as a pivotal engine propelling the evolution and upgrading of various industries.

As China Mobile's strategic platform in the digital economy, Mobile Cloud has leveraged its parent company's resources and technological prowess to achieve significant growth in the cloud computing market, with its market share steadily rising. China Mobile's latest financial report revealed that Mobile Cloud's revenue surged to RMB 100.4 billion in 2024, marking a 20.4% year-on-year increase. Notably, this is the first time Mobile Cloud's revenue has surpassed the RMB 100 billion mark, a remarkable feat considering its cloud revenue was just RMB 1.9 billion in 2019. This represents a staggering 52-fold increase in just five years.

However, despite this impressive growth, Mobile Cloud, as an emerging star in the cloud computing market, faces numerous challenges in technology accumulation, ecological barriers, and global expansion amidst fierce industry competition and rapid technological advancements.

Differentiation in the Hybrid Cloud Era

While Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud enjoy a first-mover advantage, Mobile Cloud has carved out a niche through differentiated positioning. Its core strengths lie in three key areas: infrastructure, policy dividends, and technology integration.

Firstly, as a cloud arm of the world's largest telecommunications operator, Mobile Cloud boasts a natural infrastructure edge. China Mobile's extensive 5G base station network and nationwide computing power network provide unique advantages in edge node deployment and cloud-network coordination. Mobile Cloud's unique "4+N+31+X" resource pool layout, which extends cloud computing nodes to provincial data centers, ensures 1ms latency coverage in over 80% of cities. In the Guizhou data center, Mobile Cloud, in tandem with China Mobile's 5G private network, achieved dynamic resource scheduling, supporting an e-commerce platform that processed 800,000 orders per second during the 2023 Singles' Day shopping festival. This "cloud + network + edge" architecture positions Mobile Cloud ahead in IoT and industrial Internet scenarios.

Secondly, leveraging its status as a central enterprise and extensive localized service network, Mobile Cloud has established deep-rooted barriers in key sectors such as government, healthcare, and education. As the "national team" in digital infrastructure, Mobile Cloud leverages its state-owned operator genes to build comprehensive compliance capabilities, creating a unique competitive advantage in data sovereignty protection. Data indicates that Mobile Cloud serves over one million government and enterprise customers, over 40,000 customers in the transportation industry, and over 40,000 in healthcare; it has established over 20 provincial-level and over 160 prefecture-level government cloud platforms for rural revitalization, covering 31 provinces and over 60,000 administrative villages nationwide.

Thirdly, through continuous investment in R&D, Mobile Cloud has developed a full-stack self-developed technology system. Core products like the Dayun operating system and Panshi servers have achieved localization, with distributed storage performance reaching tens of millions of IOPS and bare metal cloud server boot-up time reduced to 30 seconds. In the 2023 evaluation by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Mobile Cloud's container services, cloud-native databases, and other capabilities received the highest-level certification, indicating technological maturity on par with leading vendors.

Challenges on the Growth Path

According to IDC's "China Public Cloud Service Market (H1 2024) Tracker" report, Mobile Cloud held a 9.1% market share in the IaaS market during the first half of 2024, ranking fourth. However, as it crosses the 5% market share threshold, Mobile Cloud faces the pressure of transitioning from policy-driven to capability-driven growth, with shortcomings in technology depth and ecosystem development becoming apparent.

On one hand, Mobile Cloud lags behind leading vendors in underlying technology. Cloud computing competition hinges on computing power infrastructure and technological innovation, and leading vendors have established full-stack self-developed technology systems. For instance, Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Feitian operating system enables second-level scheduling of 10,000-card clusters, Huawei Cloud's Ascend AI chips lead the industry in compute density by two years, and Tencent Cloud's TDSQL database supports 1 billion transactions per second for WeChat Pay. In contrast, while Mobile Cloud leverages China Mobile's 6,000+ edge nodes to create a network advantage, it still relies on open-source technology adaptation for core technologies like distributed storage and Serverless architecture, and has yet to achieve breakthroughs in advanced areas such as heterogeneous computing power scheduling and green energy conservation.

On the other hand, an imperfect ecosystem poses another challenge for Mobile Cloud. As a late entrant in the cloud computing market, Mobile Cloud has noticeable shortcomings in developer ecosystem development. As of the end of 2023, the registration volume of the Mobile Cloud developer community was only 320,000, significantly trailing Alibaba Cloud. In terms of key toolchains, it lacks star-level PaaS products akin to Alibaba Cloud's Function Compute and Huawei Cloud's ModelArts, leading to high migration costs for developers. This weakness in the ecological foundation directly impacts Mobile Cloud's enterprise service capabilities, making it difficult to achieve economies of scale in the enterprise application market.

Moreover, Mobile Cloud faces challenges in market perception and brand positioning. The brand "China Mobile" is deeply associated with communication services in consumers' minds. When this brand extends to cloud computing, enterprise customers often do not view it as a professional cloud service provider. This cognitive inertia causes Mobile Cloud to frequently encounter obstacles when bidding for high-end customers in the financial and internet industries. Therefore, Mobile Cloud still needs time to enhance its brand recognition in the small and medium-sized enterprise market.

Competition Intensifies, Breakout Remains Challenging

In the global cloud computing market, competition is heating up. In the domestic market, internet giants and established ICT vendors have erected formidable barriers; in the international market, the moats of international cloud service providers are deepening. To break out, Mobile Cloud must surmount both technological barriers and ecological sieges, with each step fraught with difficulties.

In the domestic market, besides Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud, Mobile Cloud also contends with other operator clouds. Specifically, the domestic cloud computing market features a tripartite rivalry among Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, with the trio collectively accounting for over 60% of the market share. Alibaba Cloud has developed a comprehensive industry solution system leveraging its e-commerce ecosystem; Tencent Cloud has fortified its position in the audio-video and gaming fields; and Huawei Cloud has established differentiated advantages through its government and enterprise market expertise. Simultaneously, China Telecom's Tianyi Cloud and Unicom Cloud are actively expanding in government cloud and industry cloud sectors, leveraging operators' infrastructure advantages and government/enterprise customer resources, forming direct competition with Mobile Cloud.

In the international market, Mobile Cloud faces not only market competition but also compliance challenges. As domestic competition intensifies, more cloud service providers are turning to overseas markets, and Mobile Cloud is no exception. However, the challenges remain formidable. Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, and Google's Google Cloud collectively hold about 66% of the global market share, and their strength cannot be underestimated. Coupled with regulatory differences across countries and regions, building a compliance system that meets international standards will be a crucial test for Mobile Cloud's globalization efforts.

Mobile Cloud's growth trajectory epitomizes the digital transformation of state-owned enterprises. It benefits from the resource synergies of the "national team" but is also constrained by institutional inertia. While it has capitalized on the new infrastructure construction wave to achieve scale leapfrogging, it also faces the pressure to innovate in deep-water technology. As cloud computing competition shifts to the second half, emphasizing "competing on internal strength," Mobile Cloud requires more thorough market-oriented reforms, a more open technology ecosystem, and true value creation beyond price wars.