Alibaba Cloud continued to gain traction in the global cloud-infrastructure service market in the fourth quarter of 2019, but it still has a long way to go to compete against its Western peers, according to a report by research firm Canalys.

In the last three months of last year, Alibaba Cloud was the world’s fourth-largest cloud service provider, with a 5.4% market share, 1 percentage point higher than the same period of 2018, the report said.

Canalys attributed Alibaba Cloud’s global growth to its dominance in the Chinese market and hinted that the company’s plans to attract more enterprises consumers across the Asia-Pacific region and Europe might continue to grow its business globally.

Despite its slight year-on-year growth, Alibaba Cloud still trailed far behind market leader Amazon Web Services, which controlled 32.4% of the global market in the period. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud came in second and third respectively, with 17.6% and 6%.

In the three months through December, total cloud spending increased 37% to $30.2 billion, which Canalys said was the biggest quarterly growth that the market has ever seen.

Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)

Related: Cloud Services Provider Comes Down From Strong Start in First Mainland Dual-Class Listing