Rita Liao
The enthusiasm to find paying customers for artificial intelligence continues in China. AInnovation, a Chinese computer vision and machine learning startup backed by Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures and SoftBank, is trying to automate China’s massive manufacturing industry. Merely four-year-old, the startup has filed to go public in Hong...
Two of the world’s largest e-commerce players are joining joined hands. Major Chinese online retailer JD.com has formed a strategic partnership with Ottawa-based Shopify to help global brands tap China’s enormous appetite for imported goods, as well as helping Chinese merchants sell overseas.
The news is turning heads in...
One of the fastest-growing apps in China right now, by installs, is the central bank’s digital yuan wallet. 261 million individual users (as opposed to enterprises), about one-fifth of the population, have set up e-CNY wallets so far, and 87.5 billion yuan ($13.78 billion) worth of transactions has...
China’s call to foster semiconductor independence has sent investors chasing after chip startups of all sorts. Moffett AI, a Shenzhen-based chip design company, has received a fresh Series A injection. The company did not disclose the exact amount, only saying that the proceeds were in the “several tens...
Autonomous driving startups in China are in an arms race to put passengers in their machine-driven vehicles. Every few weeks, news arrives that another major player has got the greenlight to launch a new pilot program or a small-scale service.
These press releases, often dotted with regulatory jargon and...
On December 8, Roblox’s Chinese version LuoBuLeSi, published and operated by Tencent, abruptly closed down its server five months after it launched on iOS and Android.
Many users, taken by surprise, took to Chinese social media to complain about the short notice. What users had been playing was in...
Chinese internet titan Tencent is divesting its vast portfolio. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to offload more than $3 billion worth of shares in Sea, a Singaporean internet conglomerate, trimming its stake in Sea from 21.3% to 18.7% and bringing its voting rights under 10%.
The move came...
Since Kindle began shipping in China nearly nine years ago, the ebook giant has garnered a loyal following in the country. The journey has never been easy, thanks to regulatory hurdles around digital content. Recently, there are signs that the Amazon-owned ebook business is scaling back some of...
On a congested sidewalk next to a busy mall in Shenzhen, a 20-something woman uses a smartphone app to order a milk tea on Meituan, a major food delivery company. In under ten minutes, the pearl-white drink arrives, not on the back of one of the city’s ubiquitous...
