Telstra has once again added to its Asian portfolio, this time taking a strategic stake in Chinese cloud storage player Qiniu.

The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, is its second cloud deal in a week and its third investment this month. It is also its fifth investment in Asia in just over year.

Last week Telstra Corp. Ltd. (ASX: TLS; NZK: TLS) acquired Kloud, which offers managed services in Australia and across Asia. But while Kloud is likely to become a part of Telstra's cloud service offerings, the Qiniu investment will be managed by Telstra Ventures, the Australian telco's investment arm.

Privately held Qiniu was founded in 2011. According to its website it has more than 400,000 enterprise and developer users. It describes itself as a provider of solutions and services for mobile internet, Web 2.0, media ecommerce and games companies.

Matthew Koertge, managing director of Telstra Ventures, said: "With its unique, global-distributed architecture and bi-directional acceleration technology, Qiniu enables enterprise customers to collect, store and analyze huge amounts of data."

Qiniu CEO Xu Shiwei said the investment opened up opportunities for the development of "innovative products and services" for Telstra customers across the region.

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The Qiniu investment is the latest in a series of deals over the past three years that underline Telstra's shift from parochial telco to ambitious regional player seeking to grow its enterprise business.

The biggest of these was its $697 million acquisition of Pacnet last year, bringing on board a regional fiber network and corporate customer base. (See Telstra Completes Acquisition of Pacnet.)

It has also expanded its Asian footprint through a joint venture with PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk. (Telkom) , Indonesia's largest telco, called Telkomtelstra, and strengthened its expertise by snapping up several Australian IT consultancy firms.

In other directions, it collected Palo Alto-based app delivery provider Instart Logic last week, while last year's acquisitions included a Taiwan video analytics firm and a voice platform for financial traders. It also launched a startup accelerator in Singapore.

— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading