While Uber is trying to dig out from scandals and curtail losses, its former China rival, Didi Chuxing, is spending billions of dollars on other startups around the world. But is it worth $50 billion?
Li Yuan joined The Wall Street Journal in New York in 2004. She covered U.S. telecom industry and mobile Internet and edited the Chinese edition of WSJ.com.
Twitter: @LiYuan6
email: [email protected]
While Uber is trying to dig out from scandals and curtail losses, its former China rival, Didi Chuxing, is spending billions of dollars on other startups around the world. But is it worth $50 billion?
Apple became the standout China success story among big U.S. tech companies partly because the Chinese government views it as a hardware company. Now it is obviously more than that.
Chinese tech companies see voice-activated products as the gateway to a future where platforms animated by artificial intelligence will power homes, cars and offices. But to some, this first wave in the AI revolution already looks frothy.
Beijing’s internet censors are now targeting foreign movies and TV shows that are popular with young Chinese as it tries reinsert Communist ideology into public life.
With the U.S. retail industry in a state of flux, American retailers and e-commerce companies should take a look at China, where companies have been weaving together the online and offline worlds.
Jia Yueting likes to say that Apple is outdated, China’s big tech companies are innovation killers and his company is the real disrupter. But now, his dreams are fading away due to a cash crunch and worried investors.
Alibaba and Tencent’s market values are higher than those of the state-owned enterprises that dominate the Chinese economy. That gives them strength, but also makes them vulnerable.
While censorship, protectionism and copying are often the first things that many foreigners associate with Chinese tech, thinking beyond them is vital to understanding the Chinese internet.
To imagine the power of Tencent, think of it as having networking and social media reach well beyond Facebook, a video platform like YouTube plus a movie and series producer akin to a Netflix.
For much of the past two decades, Qi Lu, a search-technology whiz, waged losing battles against Google, first at Yahoo then at Microsoft’s Bing. Now, he says he can shape China’s Baidu into a worthy competitor in artificial intelligence.
Apple’s challenges have multiplied in the all-important China market over the past year or so and its effort to wring more revenue from iPhone users may be setting the company up for more trouble.
