China Tech News

Used goods trading platform Zhuanzhuan announced a strategic deal with Foxconn, aiming to promote the standardization of the trading of used phones.

Under the deal, Zhuanzhuan and Taiwan-based Foxconn will work together in phone quality inspections, supervision and guidance by assigning staff for quality inspections to promote the standardization of used phones. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

Meanwhile, for iPhones recycled in Apple's offline retail stores, Foxconn will also begin quality checks and select those suitable for online sales to sell them via Zhuanzhuan's platform. Foxconn is an original equipment manufacturer for Apple.

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JD Group, JD Finance, Thailand's leading retailer Central Group, and Provident Capital together announced that they would set up two joint ventures in Thailand to provide e-commerce service and fintech services with total investments of USD500 million.

According to the agreement, Central Group will provide half of the funds; while JD Group, JD Finance, and JD's Indonesian e-commerce business strategic cooperating partner Provident Capital will provide the other half.
JD will provide extensive professional skill support to the e-commerce joint venture, covering technology, e-commerce, and logistics. JD Finance will offer related fintech experience and technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other industry-leading technologies.

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Chinese fintech company Qudian.com has submitted its prospectus for an initial public offering to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and it aims to raise up to USD750 million.

The prospectus reveals that Qudian.com will be listed on New York Stock Exchange with stock code "QD".
Over a three-month period ended March 31, 2017, Qudian.com realized total trading value of about CNY16.7 billion, which was about USD2.4 billion, covering 4.8 million active online borrowers.

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China Telecom added 2.66 million new mobile users in August, reaching a total of 235.49 million users.

China Telecom added 4.71 million new 4G users, accumulating a total of 161.76 million 4G users by the end of the reporting period, according to the company's recently published its operating statistics for August 2017.
China Telecom's fixed-line phone users decreased by 370,000 to 123.6 million in August 2017; while its fixed-line broadband service gained 800,000 new users to 129.77 million.

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Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has signed an agreement with Alphabet subsidiary Google to sell some of its mobile phone businesses to the latter for USD1.1 billion.

With this transaction, HTC's nearly 2,000 employees who worked with the company on its Pixel smartphone will join Google. Meanwhile, HTC will provide non-exclusive licenses to some of its intellectual properties to Google.
Cher Wang, chairman of HTC, said that HTC has been the best promoter for Google's Android market expansion. With this new acquisition agreement, the two parties will further enhance their long-term stable partnership, which will not only inject strong innovative research and development into Google's hardware business, but also will ensure HTC's continuous innovation in smartphone and VR sectors.

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Lenovo's Motorola announced that the company has appointed Fu Lili, former acting president of Motorola Solutions China division, as new president of Motorola Solutions.

Fu joined Motorola in 2016. Before that, she worked for Avaya as vice president of China division.
Fu has over 25 years of senior management experience in high-tech and communications industries, which gives her a deep insight of the development history and future trend of the communications industry and a business sense about this market.

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Japan's Nintendo reached an agreement with China's Tencent to launch Tencent's popular game "Arena of Valor" on Nintendo's Switch this winter.

"Arena of Valor", with the Chinese name "Wang Zhe Rong Yao", is the English name used for the European edition of the game and Tencent plans to continue to use this name for its American edition soon to be launched.
Nintendo has been longing to expand in the Chinese market and is actively finding a way. Prior to this, Nintendo hoped to sell its Wii U console in China, but gave up the plan.

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South Korea's Hyundai Group will cooperate with China Unicom to build a big data center in Guizhou.

This is the first overseas big data center for Hyundai Group. With this move, Hyundai hopes to provide localized intelligent car networking services to Chinese consumers.

An executive from Hyundai Group said at an interview with local media that the automobile industry is going through a revolution. It is particularly important for car manufacturers to collect and process valid data, so the data center in China will facilitate that.

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Chinese-backed private equity investment company Canyon Bridge will invest EUR550 million, which is about USD743.2 million, to acquire Imagination, Apple's former GPU supplier.

Imagination had been Apple's supplier for seven years since 2010. In April 2017, Apple ended their cooperation relationship and the share price of Imagination dropped by half overnight. At that time, Apple confirmed that they were self-developing a GPU, which is the A11 Bionic chip used on the latest iPhone 8 and iPhone X. This chip is specially designed for intensive graphic operations such as AI and AR and it builds on the competitive advantage of Apple.

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Chinese Internet company Tencent is establishing a new advertising division in its Palo Alto office to provide services to American advertisers who want to reach Chinese consumers.

Yang Baoshu, vice president for Tencent's international business, said that American advertisers will be able to gain brand awareness in China. Tencent's advertising targeting technology will help advertisers target Chinese tourists who might visit America.

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