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News feed
Bite-sized news updates on China’s tech world
Thursday, Aug 4
- BYD continued its strong growth in the Chinese EV market, delivering 162,530 vehicles in July, rising 222% from last year and 21.2% from last month, according to a Wednesday announcement. The Chinese auto giant launched a new electric sedan called Seal on July 29 which is expected to compete against Tesla’s locally-built Model 3. [BYD release, in Chinese]
- The Indian government has accused leading Chinese phone maker Vivo of evading $280 million in taxes, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), India’s anti-smuggling watchdog, said it had found evidence of a customs duty evasion by Vivo India and issued a show cause notice (a formal demand for the company to explain the issue in question). The DRI’s statement comes after Vivo was accused of money laundering in India in June and is the latest in a series of moves by Indian officials targeting Chinese phone vendors, including Xiaomi, Oppo, and ZTE. [Reuters]
- Chinese battery giant CATL has abruptly postponed plans to announce plans to build its second overseas plant in North America, following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan that has exacerbated tensions between the US and Chinese governments, sources told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The world’s biggest electric vehicle battery supplier began weighing several locations in Mexico and the US to supply Tesla and Ford early this year, but has now decided to wait until at least September to make the announcement, the report said. CATL is headquartered in the eastern province of Fujian, in close proximity to Taiwan. [Bloomberg]
Friday, Aug 5
- Nio registered a new company in Shanghai on Thursday named Nio Mobile Technology Co., Ltd. in the latest sign that the Chinese electric vehicle maker is pushing to accelerate the development of its own smartphone. The new firm has listed its major business interests as sales of telecommunication devices, wearable products, and in-car smart devices, with a registered capital of $100 million and president Qin Lihong being the legal representative, according to corporate information platform Tianyancha. Chinese media reported in February that Nio had set up a new team to develop smartphones. Last month rival automaker Geely purchased a majority stake in smartphone maker Meizu as it also looks to make its own mobile devices. [Tianyancha, in Chinese]
- LinkedIn-like platform Boss Zhipin will review employee performance twice a year, according to a report by Chinese media outlet Sina on Thursday. The firm will adopt a “361” method of reviewing its staff, dividing them into three groups based on their performance reviews: the top 30%, the middle 60%, and the bottom 10%. Employees in the bottom 10% group could then face dismissal, which means the firm may cut 20% of its workforce within a year. China’s cyberspace regulator, The Cyberspace Administration of China, launched a security investigation into Boss Zhipin and made it pause new user registration in 2021. On June 29 this year, the CAC approved the platform’s resumption of new user registrations. The firm claimed on its first-quarter earnings call that there had been over 45 million attempted new registrations by the end of May. [Sina, in Chinese]
- Tencent appointed Hou Xiaonan to lead Tencent Comics from this month, reporting to the firm’s COO Ren Yuxin, media outlet LatePost reported on Thursday. Former Tencent Comics team leader Zou Zhengyu has left the company. Hou is and will remain the president of China Literature, a Tencent subsidiary specializing in online literature, and the vice president of Tencent’s online video department. The move is aimed at building tighter connections between these business units of Tencent. Hou is expected to lead more comic and animation adaptions of popular novel series. Tencent has kept an eye on this industry for years and invested $125 million in Chinese comic app Kuaikan in 2019. Rival Bilibili is contributing to similar businesses, working to bring famous novels such as The Three-Body Problem into animation.[LatePost, in Chinese]
- Alibaba reported earnings for the quarter ended June 30. Revenue was RMB 205.55 billion ($30.68 million), beating Refinitive’s RMB 203.19 billion expectation. But it is the company’s first yearly revenue decline since it went public in New York in 2014, with a fall of 0.09%. Net income was RMB 22.73 million (US$3.39 billion). The e-commerce giant attributed the performance to Covid resurgence and related control restrictions across China earlier this year but said it managed to recover some of the lost ground in June. “Following a relatively slow April and May, we saw signs of recovery across our businesses in June,” Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang told Alizila, the firm’s company news site. [CNBC]
- Chinese chip maker Loongson has managed to produce its first model of a microcontroller unit (MCU) chip for automobiles, media outlet China Start Market reported on Thursday. Auto chips and integrated circuit (IC) cards accounted for 15% of the Chinese MCU market in 2020, according to a report issued by Chinese insight firm Forward in May 2022. Loongson went public on the Shanghai STAR Market in late June, and, last month, unveiled a new bridge chip with a self-developed GPU built in. [China Start Market, in Chinese]
- Chinese gaming giant Tencent plans to increase its holdings in Ubisoft, a notable AAA title developer and publisher, Reuters reported on Thursday. Tencent bought a 5% stake in the French gaming firm in 2018 and recently discussed an increase in its holdings with the firm’s founding Guillemot family, sources told Reuters. The sources added that the exact stake Tencent plans to buy remains unclear, but the Chinese giant is aiming to be the largest shareholder in Ubisoft. Tencent and Ubisoft have had a close partnership in recent years, working to take Ubisoft’s AAA titles from PC and console to mobile platforms while also introducing Ubisoft’s titles to China. [Reuters]
- Tesla will start using a so-called “M3P battery” with lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP)-based anodes from partner CATL for its Model Y crossovers in the fourth quarter of this year, Chinese media outlet LatePost reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. LMFP is a variation on the LFP batteries which have been used in its standard-range electric vehicles at a relatively low cost to date, with the addition of manganese, and can offer longer ranges for the same weight. The Chinese battery giant has previously supplied Tesla with nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries for the long-range version of the Model Y, those batteries are more costly and less thermally stable than LFP cells. [LatePost, in Chinese]
- Li Auto said on Thursday that there is no indication that a fire involving one of the company’s Li One crossover vehicles earlier this week was caused by a technical fault. The automaker said an initial investigation had shown that the car’s battery pack, as well as its fuel tank, was intact, and no short circuit occurred when the fire began, which indicates that the incident was not due to quality issues with the vehicle. The fire happened on a highway in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu on Monday; four people were reportedly injured in the incident. [Li Auto announcement, in Chinese]
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