Bottom line: Amazon’s withdrawal from selling domestic goods to local buyers in China was inevitable due to its lack of a standout service and cut-throat competition from Alibaba and the money-losing JD.com.
Amazon shutters core China e-commerce selling domestic goods to domestic buyers
The e-commerce headlines have been buzzing these last few days with word that global giant Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is abandoning China, representing the latest setback for a western Internet company in the large market. Amazon has come out with some statements clarifying the matter, in a move somewhat akin to what happened when Internet peer Google(Nasdaq: GOOG) made a similar withdrawal nearly a decade ago.
As Google did then and Amazon is doing now, both companies are being quick to point out that they aren’t completely withdrawing from China, but rather are just exiting what’s arguably their most important business. In Google’s case it shuttered its core China search engine. Now with Amazon, the company says it’s shuttering the part of its business that sells domestically-sourced Chinese products to customers in China. (English article) Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A US prosecutor’s decision not to file rape charges against JD.com’s founder may bring short-term relief to the stock, but the case still shows the importance of understanding the unusual role Chinese founders play at their companies.
Scales of justice tip in JD.com’s favor
On this day after Christmas I thought I’d play a little catch-up by weighing in on the controversial decision that saw a Minnesota prosecutor decline to press rape charges against JD.com’s(Nasdaq: JD) founder and CEO Richard Liu. Following the big announcement at the end of last week, there’s been a minor follow-up as another former China e-commerce executive came to Liu’s defense, only to get blasted himself and end up issuing an apology.
There are several big lessons in this tale, led by the fact that Chinese standards for what constitutes acceptable behavior are not always in sync with those in the West. That’s an important lesson for Western investors who may buy into these companies thinking that, for example, a JD.com is the same thing as Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN). The JD case shows that clearly there are major differences in terms of behavior by both the companies and their founders. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A Bloomberg report on Chinese government spying microchips in hardware used by Apple, Amazon and others may be flawed, but highlights the potential for such spying due to China’s important place in the global supply chain.
Controversy builds over story of China spyware
As I return to blogging after a couple weeks absence, I wanted to weigh in on an explosive story that ran last week in Bloomberg about tiny spying chips that had been secretly loaded by China’s military onto globally used motherboards. Quite a bit has happened since the original story’s publication (English article), which said that tiny custom-made chips developed by the People’s Liberation Army had secretly been installed into motherboards assembled in China by US hardware maker Supermicro (OTC: SMCI).
The story, which went out of its way to quote quite a few unnamed sources to bolster its credibility, went on to say that those motherboards had been used in servers used by a wide range of companies and government agencies, including Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). Everyone initially applauded the ground-breaking report, which appeared to show how China could easily insert itself into the global high-tech complex by taking advantage of its important place in the hardware supply chain. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: The collapse of Dangdang’s $1.2 billion sale of itself to HNA shows the deal was most likely fueled by backdoor connections with no grounding in financial reality, and the company will probably be sold ultimately at a much lower price.
Dangdang comes out a lemon after HNA sale collapses
It’s Friday and I’m quite looking forward to the weekend, so I thought I’d indulge myself with a more gossipy post on the latest troubles of e-commerce has-been Dangdang. Anyone looking for good stock tips with this one will probably be somewhat disappointed, since Dangdang was one of a large group of Chinese firms to privatize from New York over the last few years in pursuit of higher valuations by re-listing at home.
A number of companies from that re-listing wave have already re-listed here in China, often with results that bore out the thesis that such a process was well worth the effort. Among those are names like Focus Media (Shenzhen: 002027) and Homeinns (Shanghai: 600258), which are now worth considerably more as China-traded companies than they ever were in New York. Another notable success is WuXi AppTec (Shanghai: 603259), a drug maker that was part of the larger WuXi PharmaTech that de-listed from New York in 2015. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Huawei’s decision to go ahead with a US market entry for its latest high-end phone, despite collapse of a tie-up with AT&T, is likely to produce very limited results due to lack of a carrier partner.
Huawei goes solo into US
If you can’t get a serious business partner, at least get a pretty face. That seems to be the message coming from a frustrated Huawei, which has announced it has signed on “Wonder Woman” star and model Gal Gadot as chief experience officer as it prepares to enter the US. This somewhat frivolous move was most likely part of a bigger announcement the company hoped to make for a grander entry to the US in partnership with corporate partner AT&T (NYSE: T).
But as many market watchers may already know, the AT&T deal reportedly collapsed at the last moment for unexplained reasons. The new tie-ups were all set to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) taking place this week in Las Vegas. While the show went on and Huawei announced plans to release a version of its high-end Mate 10 in the US, with Gadot as product spokeswoman, the AT&T announcement never came. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Huawei could overtake Apple as the world’s second largest smartphone seller in the next 1-2 years, while it could also pose a challenge in global cloud services over the next 5 years.
Huawei takes a shot at the cloud
We’ll begin the new week with a couple of items from Huaweithat show how the company that began as a telecoms network builder looks set to unseat fading PC giant Lenovo (HKEx: 992) as China’s global leader in consumer tech. The first of those has one research house releasing data that show Huawei’s smartphones surpassed Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) for two consecutive months in June and July to become the world’s second largest brand. The second has a Huawei executive discussing his plans for the company’s cloud computing services, saying he wants to become a global top 5 player.
The first headline shows that Huawei is not a company to be taken lightly, which means that people should pay close attention to the second headline. In my years of covering Huawei, the company has proven to be quite focused and determined, and pours large amounts of money into product development to make sure it can meet its goals. It focused its early efforts on building traditional telecoms networks, but more recently has moved to enterprise networks and consumer devices like smartphones and notebook computer. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Alibaba could buy the RT-Mart supermarket chain this year to boost its grocery business, while JD.com’s more online-focused effort and push into smaller cities looks like a better approach to the sector.
Alibaba grocer drives into Sun Art, JD goes to small cities
The online supermarket wars that began last year between e-commerce rivals Alibaba(NYSE: BABA) and JD.com (Nasdaq: JD) are heating up in the Year of the Rooster, though the pair seem to be taking slightly different tacks, at least based on the latest headlines. Leading those are reports that Alibaba is in talks for a tie-up of some sort with Sun Art (HKEx: 6808), operator of the popular RT-Mart supermarket chain. Meantime, JD is making its own headlines in the space, with an executive detailing the company’s plans to achieve 100 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) in sales from its operation this year. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: NetEase’s move into cloud computing and closure of its forum service are part of an overhaul positioning it for future growth, and could propel it into China’s top 3 Internet companies in the next 5 years.
NetEase launches cloud service
China’s lowest-key Internet giant NetEase is making some more new adjustments, extending reports last week that it was planning to spin off or sell its old but stagnating web portal business. One of the new moves includes word that the company has shuttered its equally slow-growth web forum business. The other has the company launching a new cloud service, with plans to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the business over the next few years. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Yihaodian could regain momentum in China’s online grocery market under an aggressive 1 billion yuan promotion by new owner JD.com and strong support from former owner Walmart.
Yihaodian launches 1 bln yuan promotion
One major obstacle for foreign companies in China is their reluctance to engage in the kind of cut-throat price wars that are all too common in many of the nation’s huge but extremely competitive emerging markets. Such reluctance was a big factor behind the disappointing progress for Walmart’s (NYSE: WMT) local e-commerce venture Yihaodian, and prompted the US retailer to sell the company in June in exchange for shares of local e-commerce powerhouse JD.com (Nasdaq: JD). Now we’re getting word that JD is preparing to position Yihaodian as its flagship online grocery store, and is getting set to launch a massive price war in its bid to achieve that target. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: New global initiatives by Alibaba’s cloud and electronic payments affiliates look smart by targeting Chinese customers abroad, but may only stand a 50-50 chance of longer-term success due to fierce global competition.
AliCloud global expansion moves ahead
Following lackluster results for initiatives involving its core e-commerce business outside China, Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) is pushing ahead on the global stage with new moves for 2 of its other areas with big growth potential. One of those has the company unveiling a global strategy for its cloud services unit, AliCloud, which includes a tie-up with former Taiwan smartphone superstar HTC (Taipei: 2498). The other involves Alibaba’s Ant Financial affiliate, which is rolling out its core Alipay electronic payments service in Europe. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Ericsson’s new tie-up with Inspur looks like a savvy move to gain a foothold in the nation’s fast-growing market to supply infrastructure to power Internet-related products and services.
Ericsson ties up with Inspur
Chinese IT services firm Inspur has just scored a major new partnership, with word that it’s forming a new tie-up to offer cloud and other Internet-based services with global telecoms equipment leader Ericsson. (Stockholm: ERICb). The new tie-up adds to a growing stable of similar alliances between Inspur and big-name foreign partners, following previous tie-ups with IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO).
We should begin by pointing out that this kind of tie-up isn’t that uncommon for big foreign high-tech names, since Beijing often prefers that such companies form joint ventures for doing business in the vast Chinese market. That drive for tie-ups has accelerated over the last year, following Beijing’s roll-out of a new national security law that requires foreign high-tech product makers to work with Chinese partners when selling to the government or big state-owned companies. Read Full Post…
