China’s antitrust regulator has officially started investigations into Alibaba Group Holding over alleged monopolistic business practices including a requirement for e-commerce merchants to pick only one platform as their exclusive distribution channel.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
When the last of the big four state-owned Chinese banks listed a decade ago, one could be forgiven for thinking that the age of mega Chinese financial listings was over. After all, with financial services being such a strategic sector for the Chinese Communist Party, who would have thought that the state’s stranglehold over banking and finance could ever be challenged The planned listing of Ant Group explodes that myth and reflects the massive changes which the financial landscape has seen over the past decade or so.
Read Here | The Interpreter
The richest man in China opened his own Twitter account last month, in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak. So far, every one of his posts has been devoted to his unrivalled campaign to deliver medical supplies to almost every country around the world… The billionaire entrepreneur is the driving force behind a widespread operation to ship medical supplies to more than 150 countries so far, sending face masks and ventilators to many places that have been elbowed out of the global brawl over life-saving equipment.
To get a sense of how thoroughly the global digital economy is dominated by the US and China, look no further than a recent list of the world’s most valuable internet-based companies. Eleven of the top 20 are from the US; the remainder are based in China.
Read Here – Boston Consulting Group
The acronym of the moment in Beijing is BAT: Baidu (the search engine), Alibaba (Jack Ma’s answer to Amazon), and Tencent (which is the nearest thing to Facebook). These companies are much more than clones of their US counterparts; each has shown itself to be innovative in its own right.
