alibaba

Quantifying the global e-commerce slowdown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in alibaba, Amazon, Commerce, EC Ecommerce and D2C, EC Newsletter, eCommerce, jumia, Shopify, The ExchangeNo Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic was many things. Global contagion. Health catastrophe. Herald of new geopolitical tensions and a long-running commentary on how far we’re willing to go to protect — or not — our fellow humans. It was also a business earthquake that shook up most industries around the world. But as quickly as COVID came on the scene, breaking supply lines and business models, it also faded. In the wake of most of the world learning to live with — or merely deciding to endure — the health impacts of the pandemic, many industries snapped back to their prior form. Airlines went from trash to first class; in contrast, tech companies flipped from darlings to disparaged. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Some tech concerns picked up tailwinds during COVID, in that a newly reformed business climate helped them grow for a time. You can cast a wide net here: Robinhood exploding in part thanks to consumers stuck at home with more cash than usual, Instacart seeing explosive demand for its grocery delivery service. Some tech companies went the other way, as was the case with Airbnb’s business cratering during the early COVID months as going places went from aspirational to insane overnight. Since the return to what passes as normalcy, the businesses impacted initially by COVID have charted diverging courses. Robinhood lost some of its shine as its user base, per the usually chatted narrative, went back outside. Instacart saw its growth slow but managed to hold onto its pandemic-era gains. Airbnb, an early example of the layoffs that COVID could induce at erstwhile healthy companies, recovered, and has retained much of its value since going public, a rare feat for its IPO cohort.

Alibaba eyes logistics growth in LatAm as China commerce slows • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in alibaba, brazil, China, Commerce, eCommerce, latin americaNo Comments

Cainiao, the logistics arm of Alibaba, is traveling far from home to seek expansion for its business. The company recently launched its first parcel distribution center in Brazil, adding to its regional network of sorting centers in Mexico and Chile, it said Monday. Alibaba’s e-commerce business in China has been hurt by a combination of a cooling economy and aggressive rivals like Pinduoduo. For the first time, the firm didn’t disclose the sales tally for its annual “Singles Day” shopping festival, which fell on November 11 and used to come with a Super Bowl-like gala featuring pop idols and Jack Ma himself. Cainiao has been following AliExpress abroad, helping the Alibaba-owned cross-border marketplace deliver Chinese goods to consumers around the world. But it’s now ramping up domestic services in some countries, hoping to turn local retailers into its clients. Earlier this year, the logistics giant began providing express courier service in Brazil, which now spans over 1,000 cities. The new facility in Brazil is slated to further boost Cainiao’s presence in the country. The plan is to open nine more distribution centers in seven states and set up 1,000 “smart lockers” across ten cities over the next three years. Smart lockers, which let customers pick up their e-commerce packages, have become a common sight in China. It saves couriers from running up and down buildings to deliver to people’s doorstep and helps reduce human contact during COVID-19 times. In Brazil, Cainiao aims to use the infrastructure for intra-city and cross-border logistics services as well as food delivery in the future. One of Cainiao’s smart locker clients is Piticas, a retail franchise focused on geek and pop culture products. “Our consumers can shop online and receive their parcels in a few days. In the future, we look forward to cooperating with Cainiao to utilize its smart lockers, which gives our customers more options for pick-up, as well as imports from China to Brazil, further increasing the efficiency of our supply chain,” said Vinicius Rossetti, CEO of Piticas, in a statement. Cainiao also wants to help Brazilian merchants export goods like coffee, nuts, and propolis to China, reversing the traditional trade route. The company currently operates eight weekly chartered flights between China and Brazil and plans to add more air and sea routes between the countries. In July, Cainiao opened its sorting center in Israel, bringing the number of its overseas sorting centers in use to ten at the time. As of June, Cainiao had more than 7,700 smart lockers in operation in Europe. The logistics unit accounted for roughly 5.6% of Alibaba’s revenues in the three months ended June.

Nvidia touts a slower chip for China to avoid US ban • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in alibaba, China, chip, Government & Policy, Hardware, Huawei, nvidia, semiconductor, TSMCNo Comments

Two months after the U.S. choke off China’s access to two of Nvidia’s high-end microchips, the American semiconductor design giant unveiled a substitute with a reduced processing speed for its second-largest market. The Nvidia A800 graphic processing unit is “another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in a statement to ZebethMedia. “The A800 meets the U.S. government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.” The new chip was first reported by Reuters on Monday. The A100 processor is known for powering supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and high-performing data centers for industries ranging from biotech and finance to manufacturing. Alibaba’s cloud computing business has been one of its customers. A100, along with Nvidia’s enterprise AI chip H100, were placed under a U.S. export control list to “address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia.” Nvidia previously reported that the U.S. ban could affect as much as $400 million in potential sales to China in the third quarter, so the new chip seems to be an attempt to remedy the financial loss. The A800 GPU went into production in Q3, according to Nvidia’s spokesperson. Indeed, chip distributors in China, such as Omnisky, are already marketing A800 in their product catalogs. The chip looks to be designed to circumvent U.S. export rules while still carrying out other core computing capabilities. Most of the key specs of A100 and A800 are identical except for their interconnect speeds: A800 runs at 400 gigabytes per second while A100 functions at 600 gigabytes per second, which is the performance threshold set by the U.S. ban. According to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank, “By only targeting chips with very high interconnect speeds, the White House is attempting to limit the controls to chips that are designed to be networked together in the data centers or supercomputing facilities that train and run large AI models.” Nvidia isn’t the only one slowing down its chips in order to evade U.S. sanctions. Alibaba and Chinese chip design startup Biren, which have been pouring resources into making rivals of Nvidia processors, are modifying the performance of their latest semiconductors, according to the Financial Times. That’s because Alibaba and Biren, like other fabless semiconductor firms, contract Taiwan’s TSMC to make their products. And because U.S. export controls cover chip sales by companies using American technologies, sales from TSMC fabs to China could be curtailed.

Ant’s global play is to be a payments aggregator and it now reaches 1B users • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in alibaba, alipay, Ant Financial, ant group, ant+, Fintech, jack ma, mobile payments, mobile wallet, WalletNo Comments

After trying for years to replicate the success of its QR code-enabled payments solution overseas, Ant Group seems to have finally found a path to scaling. Instead of going after end users, the Alibaba-affiliated fintech giant has been quietly forming partnerships with local payments providers in Asia. It’s built something akin to the Mastercard or Visa network for digital payments, allowing consumers to travel easily with their mobile wallet from home. Ant dubs the payments processing network Alipay+ to distinguish it from Alipay, its consumer-facing wallet that has become ubiquitous in China. Alipay+ has integrated 15 payment methods, giving it a reach of over one billion users, Angel Zhao, president of international business at Ant Group, said during the Singapore Fintech Festival on Thursday. To create a network effect, Alipay+ has been busy onboarding merchants. It’s supporting over 2.5 million businesses around the world today. A Filipino tourist visiting Japan, for instance, can pull up their GCash wallet and pay at a store that supports Alipay+ by scanning a QR code; they can also display their wallet’s QR code for the cashier to scan. Similarly, a traveler from South Korea can pay at the store with Kakao Pay, and so can a Malaysian tourist with Touch ‘n Go. All the while, Alipay+ has automatically calculated and done the currency conversion part. Alipay+ charges enterprise software fees acting as a cross-border payments and merchant marketing solution provider, a spokesperson for Ant tells ZebethMedia. But how would a user of GCash know about Alipay+ in the first place? China’s internet giants are never short of customer acquisition tactics, and subsidy is one. On the landing page of GCash, users can find an entry to a list of merchant deals provided that they pay with Alipay+. At Shein’s pop-up store in Manila, Alipay+ gives users a PHP 130 or $2 discount at checkout. Other Alipay+ partnering wallets across Asia have similarly incorporated these perks. The appeal of Alipay+ for merchants, on the other hand, is that one billion consumers can conveniently pay at their stores. That might sound impressive, but keep in mind that Alipay, which is unsurprisingly included in the Alipay+ alliance, alone boasted 700 million monthly users already in 2020 thanks to China’s sheer internet population. Alipay+ perks via GCash / Image: Ant Group Interestingly, Zhao stressed at the event that Alipay+ isn’t trying to be a super app — the type of mini app-powered ecosystem exemplified by WeChat and Alipay in China. Rather, it’s serving as an infrastructure layer for other consumer-oriented wallets. “While many of you are familiar with the success of Alipay in China, Alipay+ is not another SuperApp we are launching globally. Built on top of the technology capabilities and know-how of Alipay, Alipay+ offers cross-border digital payment and marketing solutions connecting global merchants, online and offline, with multiple e-wallets and payment methods from different countries and regions and helping the merchants to engage with mobile-savvy consumers of those payment methods. We are off to a remarkable start since its official debut last year.” As of today, Alipay+ has integrated with the following payments providers in Asia: Akulaku Paylater (Indonesia) Alipay (Mainland China) AlipayHK (Hong Kong) Boost (Malaysia) The Bank of the Philippine Islands app (The Philippines) Dana (Indonesia) EZ-Linke Wallet (Singapore) HelloMoney by Asia United Bank (The Philippines) GCash (The Philippines) Kakao Pay (South Korea) Rabbit Line Pay (Thailand) TrueMoney Wallet (Thailand) Touch ‘n Go eWallet (Malaysia) Although Ant has been exploring overseas growth for years, the task gained renewed urgency as Beijing told it to overhaul all facets of its business in China. Following the revamp, Ant is expected to operate more like a traditional financial holding company and shoulder more capital risks, which will inevitably hurt its profitability.

Don’t panic — this isn’t Tencent’s first tie-up with a state-owned firm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in alibaba, Beijing, China, Government & Policy, jack ma, TencentNo Comments

News on Tencent and China Unicom is causing a stir in China’s tech industry on Wednesday afternoon. The gaming and social networking behemoth and the state-owned carrier have received regulatory approval to set up a joint venture, according to a government announcement. Following the transaction, Tencent and China Unicom will respectively own 42% and 47% of the firm. The development has led to concerns over even greater government influence on China’s Big Tech. Some netizens go as far as speculating Tencent will eventually be de-privatized. This reaction is expected given China has been tightening its grip on the internet industry over the past three years. Tencent’s gaming business, for instance, took a big hit when Beijing halted the issuance of new gaming permits. But a closer look at the notice suggests this new “mixed ownership” entity seems to have a limited impact on Tencent’s existing business. The entity, according to a filing in September, will center around two areas: content delivery network and edge computing. CDN refers to a geographically distributed network of servers that work together to speed up content distribution for users, whereas edge computing means processing data at the periphery rather than the center of a network. Tencent’s cloud computing arm seems most pertinent to the new JV. The enterprise-facing segment has gained new significance as a revenue driver since China’s regulatory clampdown sent chills across the consumer internet sector. And it’s indeed in the area of web infrastructure where Tencent’s involvement in the public sector has been the most active. Tencent Cloud has a page dedicated to showcasing the sort of public services it empowers. From online government services to community centers with self-serve kiosks, one can find solutions supplied by Tencent — and in fact, Alibaba, Baidu, and other tech giants we well. Beijing has been working to digitize the government apparatus for years, and what better solution providers are there than its own tech darlings? Tencent has been boasting the role of WeChat as a digital infrastructure for government services as early as 2019: The WeChat owner is no stranger to mixed ownership either. In 2017, China Unicom was seeking to raise $11.7 billion from a dozen investors — including Tencent and Alibaba — as part of Beijing’s push to revitalize state-owned enterprises with private capital, a structure dubbed ‘mixed ownership.’ Working with a state-owned entity doesn’t naturally imply a greater presence of the visible hand at Tencent. The goal of an SOE is to earn profits for the government, too. But undeniably, China’s private tech sector has been under growing pressure to align its interest with that of the state through a series of regulatory overhauls, often at the cost of their profitability. Ant Group has gone through a deep restructuring to play more like a traditional financial institution. Tencent has ramped up protection for minors and put more effort into educational games.