China Tech News

JD.com, the smaller rival to Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, has made people notice it again with the announcement that it has acquired Yihaodian.com, which is owned by U.S.-based Walmart.

Interestingly, Walmart tried to buy JD.com five years ago, but when the U.S. company was rebuffed it chose to buy the small startup Yihaodian instead. So the news that JD.com has now bought Walmart's company comes as a 180-degree turn in the relationship, and perhaps mirrors the strength Chinese companies have started to show in their offshore and foreign purchases.

As part of the agreement, Walmart will receive 144,952,250 newly issued JD.com Class A ordinary shares, amounting to approximately 5% of total shares outstanding and the companies will partner in several strategic areas.

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Chinese maternal and baby supplies e-commerce platform Beibei.com completed its fourth round financing of USD100 million.
Its investors included well-known investment organizations such as New Horizon, Northern Light Venture Capital, Banyan Capital, and Capital Today. Of these, New Horizon, Banyan Capital, and Capital Today previously invested in Beibei.com.

According to Beibei.com, the company's gross merchandise volume in 2015 reached CNY4 billion and it expects to reach over CNY10 billion in 2016. The website currently has over 50 million users and more than 5,000 cooperating brands.

Zhang Lianglun, founder and chief executive officer of Beibei.com, said that the reason for the rapid development of Beibei.com is because it gained the recognition of the younger generation of mothers. Over 85% of users of Beibei.com are female and most of them are young moms, who are the major consumption decision-makers and have strong consumption powers in China.

Commenting on the development after the latest financing, Zhang said they will use the new investment to develop their own supply chain, improve consumer experience, and expand new businesses. Based on its existing core categories, Beibei.com will further expand into products related to home commodities and apparel.


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Chinese search engine Baidu.com has made a fintech investment in an American blockchain company.

U.S. Bitcoin start-up Circle Internet Financial announced that they gained USD60 million funding from a consortium, which was led by IDG and participants included Breyer Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Baidu, CICC Alpha, China Everbright Investment and Assets Management, IBM's former chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, and Silver Lake's co-founder Glenn Hutchins.

Circle was jointly founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in Boston in 2013. The company uses blockchain technology to optimize consumer payment methods. Circle's co-founders hope to enter the P2P payment market with Bitcoin and allow users to realize rapid transfers with their friends.

At the end of 2014, Circle launched its first app and the company gained its first digital currency license BitLicense in September. In April 2016, Circle gained the first electronic currency license issued by the British government.


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Fifteen years ago, some staid Chinese manufacturers got sexy by calling themselves Internet companies, and China Unicom's latest move into the very busy fintech sector harkens back to that era.

Chinese telecom operator China Unicom just held the opening ceremony for its financial company Unicom Group Finance Company Limited, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission Beijing Office issued a financial license to the company during the ceremony.

Unicom Group Finance Company Limited has registered capital of CNY3 billion. China Unicom's deputy general manager Li Fushen will be chairman of the financial company; China Unicom's general manager of financial department Li Zhangting is appointed vice chairman of the new company; and Wang Fang is appointed director and general manager of the company.

Li Fushen said at the opening ceremony that the establishment of the financial company is an important measure for China Unicom to focus on development and innovation in the future.

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Following Foxconn's USD3.5 billion acquisition of Sharp, the Taiwanese company will position the new executive team in July to accelerate commercial application of Sharp patents, but it will also reportedly close Sharp's redundant and inefficient overseas businesses and cut 7,000 employees.

Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Foxconn, said at the company's annual general meeting that he plans to promote the commercial application of Sharp's patents to transform non-profitable businesses into profitable businesses. He said Sharp has many technologies, but they did not apply them yet to products in the market. However, Foxconn is good at turning patents into technologies and turning technologies into products.

Gou said Foxconn will complete related legal procedures of the Sharp acquisition before the end of June 2016. Starting from July, the new management team will take over and the company will purge 7,000 employees. Foxconn will close some of Sharp's redundant and inefficient overseas businesses, including certain sales joint ventures. Gou pointed out that Sharp has too many affiliates, which leads to high daily spending.


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American augmented reality technology company Meta announced the completion of its USD50 million round of funding and its major investors included Horizons Ventures Limited, Lenovo, Tencent, Banyan Capital, Comcast Ventures, and GQY.
In February 2016, Meta launched its new-generation product Meta 2. According to the company, Meta 2 is a natural machine learning system developed based on neuroscience principles. By creating user experiences that are completely in line with human instinct, Meta 2 will change people's working, entertainment, communication, and interaction activities.
Meron Gribetz, chief executive officer of Meta, said that Meta integrates the leading optical solutions with an interactive system designed basing on neuroscience principles. Compared with traditional products, it is easier to use and features stronger functions for users.

Yue Bin, founding partner of Banyan Capital, said that Meta may be the only start-up that can directly compete with large companies such as Microsoft and Magic Leap in the AR sector. Other Chinese firms like Lenovo and Tencent added to the Sino flavoring of this latest round of investment.

After completing the new funding, Meta will continue to improve its hardware and software technical reserves. In regards to business expansion, technologies for its next-generation product Meta 3 are undergoing development in addition to related applications development. The company has not directly reported if the Chinese cash infusion will immediately lead to a China-based focus of its services.

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Upselling consumers to a better smartphone battery or a portable router is a key reason a top Chinese electronics retailer just signed a major deal.

Chinese mobile phone retail chain D.Phone and smart mobile peripherals company Pisen Electronics have reached a strategic deal in Beijing to work together in various sectors. Those areas for cooperation include channel resources, product resources, full-channel marketing, and user services. Financial terms of the deal were not released though.

For the first step, D.Phone and Pisen will establish a joint physical chain store network and the number of stores is expected to reach over 12,000. Over the first three months after the signing of the agreement, the two parties will complete upgrades of the first batch of 3,000 stores.

Prior to this, D.Phone launched a channel expansion and ecosphere construction project. With this project, the company aims to cooperate with mobile phone makers, carriers, e-commerce platforms, offline retailing terminals, and professional service supporting systems to integrate products, content, and service resources.

In October 2015, Pisen made a strategic investment in 3C1000.com, which is a 3C smart device O2O e-commerce platform. At present, 3C1000.com has over 9,000 physical franchise stores, covering more than 2,500 cities, counties, villages, and towns in China. Meanwhile, most of those stores are located in communities, which is convenient for delivery and user services.

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Microsoft announced that its Greater China Chairman and CEO Ralph Haupter will become Microsoft worldwide senior vice president and Asia Pacific president and will relocate to Singapore.

Meanwhile, Microsoft France President Alain Crozier will replace Haupter to be new Greater China chairman and CEO.
In his new role, Haupter will lead Microsoft's work in Asia Pacific, which includes 12 subsidiaries in 39 countries and regions, 13,500 employees, and over 100,000 partners. Haupter will be responsible for Microsoft's products, services, and support in Asia Pacific and promote Microsoft's transformation in this region.

Haupter was appointed chairman and CEO for Microsoft Greater China in April 2012. During his term of office, Haupter led the development of Microsoft's cloud services in China and promoted the company's cooperation with 21Vianet and Tsinghua Tongfang. He also promoted Microsoft's cooperation with Tencent and Baidu to provide free-of-charge Windows 10 upgrade services in China.

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For most of its existence, the Internet was largely formed and administered by American organizations. But Asian firms now have the opportunity to be the gatekeepers for the brave, new world of virtual reality.

And the key to domination in virtual reality is real money, so the announcement that Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has established the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance with 28 venture capital firms helps leverage the fantastic usability of the HTC Vive headset into many more business models in the near-future.
In April 2016, HTC initiated the Asia Pacific Virtual Reality Alliance. Cher Wang, chairman of HTC, announced that the company would implement a Vive X accelerator program and provide a total of over USD100 million funding support to aid VR content and technical teams and establish a VR ecosphere.

Wang Congqing, HTC's VR general manager in China, said that the first batch of entrepreneurial team registrations for the Vive X accelerator program ended at the end of May 2016. HTC received applications from over 1,200 VR entrepreneurial teams from more than 30 countries and regions and over half of them are from China. Those teams cover various sectors, including hardware, software, content and technology.

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Ethical hacker and security researcher Dymtro Oleksiuk revealed that Lenovo's computers have security vulnerabilities and hackers could bypass Windows security protocol to attack those computers.

Apart from expressing the concern about Lenovo computers, Oleksiuk also said that some of Lenovo's drivers are a direct copy from Intel, so he is worried that products of other manufacturers such as HP's Pavilion laptops might have the same security vulnerabilities.

In response to the remarks, Lenovo published and updated yesterday a statement about its "System Management Mode (SMM) BIOS Vulnerability". The company explained that the codes with the problem were not written by Lenovo, but provided by a third-party partner of Intel.


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