[Interview] Song Zhi, Alibaba Cloud Head of Korea-Japan Region
"Dealing with Korean clients is quite challenging. The market competition is very intense, so they demand high 'cost-effectiveness.' If their demands are met, it can be said that we can satisfy the entire world."
Song Zhi, Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence for Korea and Japan, explained this reason for focusing on the Korean market during an interview with Asia Economy held on the 15th at Alibaba's Beijing headquarters. Song joined Alibaba Cloud in 2014 as an early member of the international business team when the company began preparing for overseas expansion, and he currently oversees the Korea and Japan regions.
As the world's third-largest cloud company after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft (MS), Alibaba Cloud considers Korea a special strategic market. The company first entered Korea in 2016 and established its first data center in Seoul in March last year. It has provided cloud services to companies such as Zepeto, E-Land, Amorepacific, and Atomy, and supported their expansion into China. Currently, it has hundreds of Korean companies as clients. Song explained that through an aggressive market entry strategy, Alibaba Cloud maintains an annual growth rate of over 50% in Korea.
He added, "Many Korean companies are aiming to expand into Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, which are markets where Alibaba Cloud has the strongest competitiveness," emphasizing, "In this regard, we can better support Korean clients." He also elaborated, "Korea's open attitude toward new technologies and high understanding of cloud services make the Korean market even more special." The speed of cloud adoption by Korean companies is relatively fast within the Asian region. According to Alibaba Cloud's research, more than 66% of Korean companies responding have over three years of cloud usage experience, the highest among Asian respondents.
The Chinese shopping festival known as Guanggunjie (November 11) is also backed by Alibaba Cloud's technology. Despite hundreds of thousands of accesses and orders flooding in per second, there has been no server crash or connection delay since 2009. Song emphasized, "Alibaba Cloud's technology is not something that came out of a laboratory but is proven technology born from solving real problems." In fact, the related technology was developed during the process of resolving the annual crash of China's train ticket booking site caused by a surge in traffic during the Spring Festival (Chunje, 春節) period.
When asked whether recent political conflicts or emotional issues between Korea and China pose obstacles to business, he responded, "We focus on what we can do." He stated, "Political issues are beyond our influence," emphasizing, "Our considerations are our products, services, quality, and we focus only on matters related to the cloud." Regarding the company's goals, he said, "It really doesn't matter what rank we hold in the market," adding, "Providing the best quality at the same price, that is, cost-effective service, and helping our clients achieve their goals as much as possible."
He also expressed a strong commitment to active talent recruitment and development. Showing the company intranet login screen, Song said, "It has been 3,066 days since I joined this company, and during that time, I have interviewed about 1,200 people," adding, "That means I have conducted interviews at a rate of one every 2.5 days." He continued, "Alibaba is a company at the forefront of the cloud field in China, so recruitment is very strict and demanding," but added, "However, there is a corporate culture that continuously provides opportunities for failure and growth together."
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