KrASIA Weekly: Chinese tech majors’ share prices tumble

2018-08-19

Hi there, it’s Robin

The past week saw the almost simultaneous fall in share prices of two Chinese tech giants.

On the 15th of August, Tencent and Alibaba reportedly fell as much as 8.7% and 3.5% respectively.

Tencent posted of its first profit drop in the past decade, and the recent case of regulators blocking the sale of one of Tencent’s blockbuster games might have fueled concerns amongst investors.

Alibaba’s share prices seemed to have been hit by the negativity out there in the market.

JD.com, the other Chinese e-commerce giant that is reported to be closing the gap behind Alibaba via its solid in-house logistics, also posted Q2 2018 losses this week.

Nonetheless, JD’s net service revenues grew strongly in Q2 2018, driven mainly by its advertising and supply chain management. It remains to be seen whether the inherent differences between the asset-heavy JD and the asset-light Alibaba will allow JD a shot at Alibaba’s success thus far.

After all, while Alibaba’s Tmall is the largest B2C platform, JD is actually the number one leading e-tailer in Asia in terms of direct e-commerce sales.

The Alibaba of today, however, is much more than simply an e-commerce retailer and it doesn’t just compete in the e-commerce marketplace sector.

For example, it recently partnered Starbucks China, looking to integrate Starbucks into its Hema stores, do delivery services via its food and beverage delivery arm Ele.me, and also to co-develop an online Starbucks store for an online-to-offline (O2O) seamless experience.

Its cloud computing arm inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National University of Singapore (NUS) this week, looking at collaborating to support talent in the industry.

In its e-commerce segment, Alibaba is not taking anything to chance and is constantly looking out for international expansion opportunities. This week, for instance, Alibaba moved forward to invest in Turkey’s Trendyol to compete against Amazon.

Just like the case in Turkey, there are cases of domestic players in the tech space in Southeast Asia, as well as growing partnerships with the major tech players in China.

Sendo, a Vietnamese online marketplace, is one example of domestic players. The company just secured $51m in funding this week for its expansion plans.

As for growing collaborations, Singapore’s SingPost is looking to deploy Alipay across all its post offices by end-2018, to tap on the growth opportunity in the Southeast Asia region’s last-mile fulfilment sector.

Another case in point would be Grab. The region’s unicorn recently made its first foray into the healthcare industry through a partnership with China’s Ping An.

Read on to find out more interesting stories from last week, and feel free to tip us if you have news clue or you just want to talk with us, email us at hello@kr-asia.com and we are looking forward to hearing from you.

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