Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) yesterday said it would buy all the remaining shares of mobile browser firm UCWeb (優視) in the biggest merger in Chinese Internet history, as the e-commerce giant steps up its spending spree ahead of its US listing.
Alibaba’s latest deal, hot on the heels of a string of investments that already total US$4.8 billion in the past six months, will be larger even than Baidu Inc’s (百度) US$1.9 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless Websoft Ltd (91無線網絡) last year, Alibaba said.
Alibaba’s investment in UCWeb shows the company’s determination to do more business on mobile in the world’s biggest smartphone market. However, rival Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), China’s biggest listed Internet firm, dominates smartphone screens with its near-ubiquitous mobile messaging app WeChat, a situation that Alibaba executives have publicly railed against.
“This integration will create the biggest merger in the history of China’s Internet,” Alibaba said on its microblog.
Alibaba already held about a 66 percent stake in UCWeb, according to its initial public offering (IPO) filing last month.
Alibaba and UCWeb will form the UCWeb Mobile Business Group responsible for Internet browsers, location-based services, search services, mobile gaming platform, mobile application distribution and mobile literature services, UCWeb said in a statement.
UCWeb chief executive Yu Yongfu (俞永福) will serve as the business group’s chairman and become part of Alibaba’s “strategic decision-making committee,” Alibaba said.
Alibaba is preparing for a US IPO that could value the firm as high as US$150 billion, according to analyst estimates. Even so, the firm and its affiliates have splurged on investments totaling more than US$6.7 billion in the past six months alone.
The deal will mainly be done using Alibaba’s stock with a smaller part as cash, Alibaba said.
UCWeb said the mobile search service had a market share of more than 20 percent.
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