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Ant Group affiliate OceanBase has unveiled plans to strengthen its presence in Hong Kong, using the city as a base for overseas expansion to grow its share in the global database market dominated by US technology giant Oracle. The Chinese distributed database provider had designated Hong Kong as a “strategic hub” for its global expansion, following rapid growth in the city, as well as in Macau and the mainland, CEO Evan Yang said on Thursday. The move further solidified Hong Kong’s role as a hub for mainland Chinese technology companies seeking to enhance their international influence. To support its ambitions, OceanBase ensured that its solutions were compatible with six major global cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, enabling it to serve over 50 regions worldwide, according to Yang. The company had also begun establishing local teams in Southeast Asia, Japan, Latin America and the US west coast, he said. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post. While Oracle remained the world’s top database provider and was likely to maintain that position for the foreseeable future, Yang highlighted OceanBase’s advantages, such as an infrastructure better suited for artificial intelligence workloads and a strong commitment to open source. “We highly respect Oracle in terms of product capabilities,” he said. “But it can’t scale or move forward any faster.” Founded within the Alibaba ecosystem in 2010 and headquartered in Beijing, OceanBase replaced Oracle as the backbone of Alipay’s core transaction system in 2014 and handled 10 per cent of Taobao’s Singles’ Day traffic that year, according to its website. OceanBase currently serves more than 2,000 enterprises, including Chinese state-owned banks, large insurance firms and investment houses, according to Yang. The company entered the Hong Kong market three years ago and counts more than 25 local institutions as its customers, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Asia), Hang Seng Bank and digital asset trading platform HashKey Exchange. Established as a separate business entity in 2020, OceanBase was fully owned by Ant Group until July last year, when it underwent a share swap. OceanBase’s 35 shareholders include Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao, two Alibaba affiliates, along with several major Chinese venture capital firms such as China Capital Investment Group, HongShan Capital Group and Yunfeng Capital. Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao, OceanBase’s largest shareholders, own 25.4 per cent and 19.7 per cent of the company, respectively. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has a 1.1 per cent stake in Junhan, while Junao counts Alibaba’s current and former CEOs among its shareholders, according to Chinese corporate database Tianyancha. In March 2024, Ant Group announced an overhaul, dividing its operations into several independently run business units, including OceanBase, Ant International for overseas operations and Ant Digital Technologies for blockchain initiatives, each with its own board of directors. Yang said OceanBase planned to raise additional funds next year and was considering an initial public offering, although there was no concrete listing plan. As part of its expansion efforts in Hong Kong, OceanBase would launch a “Talent 1000 Accelerator” programme to train more than 1,000 IT professionals with expertise in distributed databases over the next five years, the company said.
