The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has released its provisional findings for its cloud services market investigation which set out to see if there were elements of cloud service providers' offerings that had an "adverse effect on competition" (AEC), and has provisionally concluded that some AECs are arising from features of the market.
In the summary document shared by the CMA, it said that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft hold by far the greatest market share in the cloud computing sector, noting: "We have provisionally found that AWS and Microsoft have been generating sustained returns from their cloud services substantially above their cost of capital in cloud services for a number of years."
It adds: “There are also economies of scale, whereby larger cloud providers have lower ongoing costs. The largest cloud providers are making very large investments to expand their services in coming years, and while this investment can have procompetitive effects and benefit cloud customers, it may also deter market entry or expansion by potential rivals."
