Chinese online retail giant Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has struck a deal to buy a US$586 million stake in popular Chinese social network site Sina Weibo (新浪微博) amid rumors that it is preparing for a stock market listing.
It also comes as Alibaba, China’s biggest online retail company, gets set for a handover of power from founder Jack Ma (馬雲) to executive vice president Lu Zhaoxi (陸兆禧).
18 PERCENT STAKE
Alibaba will pay Sina Corp (新浪) for an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like site that claims to have more than 500 million members in China, valuing it at about US$3 billion.
The deal also enables Alibaba to “increase its ownership in Weibo to 30 percent ... within a certain period of time in the future,” Sina said on its Web site, adding that the two sides would cooperate on e-commerce projects.
The deal comes as analysts expect Alibaba to announce an initial public offering this year, with some suggesting the company could be valued at more than US$100 billion.
RIVAL
The deal would strengthen Alibaba relative to Chinese rival Tencent Holdings (騰訊), which in the past year has unveiled ambitious plans in the Alibaba-dominated e-commerce business, Dow Jones Newswires said.
Alibaba’s businesses include Taobao (淘寶), China’s most popular online shopping site, which had more than 800 million product listings and more than 500 million registered users as of last year.
Stocks in US-traded Sina jumped 10 percent after the deal was announced on Monday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy