If there was one thing that stood out from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s quarterly earnings report, it was a tripling of revenue from its fledgling cloud business.
Analysts have highlighted sales from its cloud division, known as Aliyun, which soared 175 percent in the March quarter to more than 1 billion yuan ($154 million). Alibaba now has more than half a million paying customers for its services and Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu said it’s “getting very close to the break-even point” as it tries to build a challenger to Amazon.com Inc.
