Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) plans to invest in Snapchat Inc, the mobile application for sending disappearing photographs, at a valuation of US$15 billion, people familiar with the situation said.
China’s biggest e-commerce company intends to invest US$200 million, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Snapchat is part of a breed of startups with multibillion-dollar valuations, with investors lining up to offer financing.
With the latest deal, Snapchat would be ranked behind only mobile car-booking application Uber Technologies Inc and Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp (小米), according to data compiled by researcher CB Insights.
Xiaomi is pegged at US$45 billion, while Uber’s latest round valued it at US$40 billion.
“We continue to hire across the business,” chief executive officer Evan Spiegel said at the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California.
He declined to comment on fundraising efforts, adding: “We are famous for not talking about the future.”
Snapchat, based in Los Angeles, was in discussions last month to raise US$500 million in a round of financing that could value the company at US$16 billion to US$19 billion, a person familiar with the situation said at the time.
Alibaba’s planned investment would be outside of that round, one of the people said on Wednesday.
Alibaba declined to comment on the funding.
Alibaba was also involved in discussions last year to invest in Snapchat ahead of the marketplace’s initial public offering in September last year, although a deal did not happen.
Alibaba is expanding beyond its core business of e-commerce, adding other investments such as finance and entertainment content as part of a plan to serve 2 billion customers globally.
Snapchat lets people take and draw on photos, then send them to select friends or add them to a public “story.” The photos and videos disappear seconds after the recipient views them.
The company says its users — the app is popular among teens — send more than 700 million disappearing “snaps” and view more than 500 million stories daily.
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