Hi there. It’s Brady again, here to round out your week.
If you’re into e-commerce, then news from the past couple of days in China surely piques your interest. For eight years, Alibaba and Tencent have engaged in a soft turf war, blocking links to each other’s sites and carving the country’s tech scene into factions based on business alliances and investments. To some extent, the division has spread into Southeast Asia too—Lazada calls itself the “regional flagship” of the Alibaba Group, which also owns a stake in Tokopedia.
But the situation may be changing, largely because regulators said Tencent and Alibaba need to make good and ditch their monopolistic ways. For now, it’s unclear how the two conglomerates will open their services to one another, but there will be incredible consequences for the e-commerce sector and other fields no matter the degree. We unpacked the significance of this development for the two companies as well as Pinduoduo and ByteDance.
The three-pronged crackdown in China—antitrust, fintech, and data sovereignty—is far from over, but the lines of conflict are already being redrawn in momentous ways. Similar policies are being debated and shaped in major economies around the world. Beijing just happens to be a step or two ahead of the pack.
Daily Roundup
- Tencent’s game streaming mega merger hit a regulatory wall, so who lost out?
- PUBG creator Krafton leads USD 48 million Series D round in local storytelling platform Pratilipi.
- Alibaba and Tencent weigh openings in “walled gardens” to make services accessible to each other.
- Here’s everything you’ll find in your fully autonomous vehicular future.
- Kuaishou adds informative livestreamed content as growth in entertainment vertical stalls.
- Moying Robotics closes Series A for advanced logistics automation.
- South Korea’s digital lenders challenge the nation’s traditional giants.