Bottom line: Alibaba’s Koubei is unlikely to gain major traction despite its $1.1 billion in new funding, due to its late arrival to a crowded O2O take-out dining space already dominated by Baidu, Ele.me and Meituan-Dianping.
Koubei raises $1.1 billion
The longer I stay in China, the more the latest stories coming from the Internet sector look like I’ve seen them before. That’s certainly the case with Koubei, the Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) online-to-offline (O2O) take-out dining delivery service, which is close to landing a fresh $1.1 billion in new funding. In this case, Alibaba’s extremely late arrival to the space looks a lot like its vain attempt to play catch-up to Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) WeChat with a service called Laiwang back in 2013. Read Full Post…
The slower summer months haven’t cooled down appetite for new M&A among Chinese Internet firms, with word that e-commerce leader Alibaba is chasing a massive investment that could see it purchase a stake in US social networking high-flyer Snapchat. At the same time, software security specialist Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU) has just announced new plans to raise up to $1 billion through a convertible bond offer, in what also could be the prelude to a major new acquisition. Read Full Post…
After years of hovering at the edge of China’s gadget and app markets, Japanese mobile instant messaging giant Line and Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Xbox gaming console are both reportedly preparing to enter the market. Line’s plan looks the most exciting to me, as the product has quickly gained a major following in Asia and could find a receptive audience in China with its new partnership. Meantime, I’m less optimistic about Xbox, as its China entry comes after its consoles have been available on the local gray market for years, and it will face competition from a new group of homegrown products. Its choice of the struggling Shanghai Media Group (SMG) as its partner also doesn’t look too exciting to me. Read Full Post…
Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s worries about the rapid rise of mobile instant messaging service WeChat appear to be well founded, with word that Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) wildly popular platform will create an exclusive shopping channel for Alibaba’s chief rival JD.com. This kind of deal must certainly be Ma’s biggest nightmare, as it will instantly link JD, China’s second largest e-commerce company, with the hundreds of millions of young Chinese who regularly use WeChat to communicate. What’s more, WeChat has shown itself quite capable of converting its users into shoppers who could easily become JD customers. Read Full Post…
Things have certainly changed over the last 3 years in Lunar New Year messaging, as reflected by the flood of tech executives using their microblogs to weigh in on Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) launch of a red envelope gift function for its popular WeChat platform over the holiday period. Most of the comments were admiring and even in a slight state of awe at the big success of WeChat’s hongbao product, which lets users send gift money to their friends and relatives over the popular instant messaging platform. But at least one post from Alibaba smelled of sour grapes, and a Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) executive also took a backhanded swipe at the rival to his company’s own Weibo microblogging service. Read Full Post…
The microblog realm has been buzzing loudly this final week of 2013 with stories that are likely to be major themes in the new year, led by a probable IPO by Jingdong, China’s second largest e-commerce firm. Meantime, e-commerce leader Alibaba was showing no signs of slowing down the endless promotion of its recently launched mobile instant messaging (IM) service Laiwang, as it tries to catch up with Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) hugely popular WeChat rival service. Lastly, tweets coming from top e-commerce firms Dangdang (NYSE: DANG) and Suning (Shenzhen: 002024) hint that 2014 could see the start of consolidation in the booming but also fiercely competitive parcel delivery sector, perhaps including a few major acquisitions and closures and a long-awaited domestic IPO for China Postal Express, the parcel delivery unit of China’s Post Office. (previous post) Read Full Post…
Lenovo compliments Huawei on Italy smartphone push
China’s microblogging sphere is buzzing with a series of new posts that hint at a couple of budding friendships in the nation’s tech realm, one between smartphone aspirants Huawei and Lenovo (HKEx: 992) and the other between e-commerce titan Alibaba and online search leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU). Of course it’s quite possible that the tweeting is just casual conversation by company executives on their Weibo accounts. But both instances also hint at the potential for future tie-ups that could help these all 4 of these companies attain their different strategic aims. Read Full Post…
I’ve been watching with interest this week as e-commerce leader Alibaba has discovered a sudden urgency to grow its business in the social networking (SNS) space, with founder Jack Ma leading the charge. In the last few days, media have reported that Alibaba has made a major new acquisition in the sector, and Ma is also trumpeting the importance of the company’s recently launched Laiwanginstant messaging service that will compete with Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) hugely popular WeChat service. All this comes after Alibaba earlier this year signed a landmark agreement to buy a major stake in Sina’s(Nasdaq: SINA) Weibo service, often called the Twitter of China. Read Full Post…
