Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial has made its latest aggressive international push this week — with a $200 million investment into a fintech project belonging to Kakao, the $5 billion firm that runs Korea’s dominant messaging service. Ant Financial — the firm that stands behind both...
China’s Alibaba Group Holding has announced a strategic alliance with the Bailian Group — China’s largest retailer by store numbers — to join the e-commerce giant’s drive to use big data to improve and profit from brick-and-mortar sales. The deal does not include any direct...
The Chinese New Year is upon us — and as is their annual custom, Tencent and Alibaba are competing to see which firm can own the hongbao game. For those unfamiliar, hongbao is the name for the tradition of gifting red envelopes with money inside. And while...
Despite a several years-long run of making some massive acquisitions, Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma says that 2017 will be a bit different. Ma noted that this year, Alibaba is looking to do a lot less buying and a lot more collaborating. “I am not...
In the wake of the great demonetization, India’s small business are reporting tough times: a third of the jobs in the sector have been cut and revenues are down by half in the 34 days since Narendra Modi, the country’s prime minister, announced his plan to...
WeChat founder Allen Zhang had some praise to offer Apple yesterday — on the 10th anniversary of the release of the iPhone — just as he was laying down a challenge to the dominance of the application market that Apple has enjoyed over the last decade or...
The first nationwide crackdown on P2P lending in China is underway — and expected to eliminate many of the 2,400 or so leading platforms in the nation. The crackdown comes following a series of multi-billion dollar scams in the Chinese P2P lending space, as well...
The times they are a changin’ — as the People’s Bank of China has ordered local banks to stop issuing co-branded (bearing both the logo of UnionPay and a foreign card network), dual currency payment cards in mainland China, according to reports emerging this morning. The...
Given the virtual avalanche of troubles Samsung has endured of late, the investigation by its home government was the last shoe to drop. And drop it has — the South Korean government has officially launched its own investigation to find out what caused the Galaxy Note...
