Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) is cutting its spending on travel and postponing some new hiring as China’s largest e-commerce company braces for a slowing economy, people familiar with the matter said.
Some new hires were told they cannot start until the new fiscal year begins in April, the people said, asking not to be named because the matter is private.
The travel cuts include restricting business-class airfares on a unit-by-unit basis, with staff only able to select a premium cabin on every fifth round trip that takes more than 20 hours, one of the people said.
The trade dispute with the US is casting a bigger shadow over China, with the macroeconomic slowdown hitting everything from hardware manufacturers to the world’s biggest start-up Bytedance Ltd (字節跳動), which is said to have barely hit its revenue target for last year.
Beijing has also played a role.
The nation has faced the biggest digital crackdown in history over the past year or so, with everything from games to streaming platforms censored and sometimes banned.
A sudden freeze on game licenses threw the industry into disarray and slashed US$200 billion from Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊) value at one point.
Hiring by China’s technology companies plummeted by a fifth in the final quarter of last year as the nation’s largest corporations grappled with mounting economic uncertainty, according to a study of national job ads released yesterday.
The number of IT and Internet positions advertised nationwide fell by 20 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, according to a report from Renmin University and the nation’s largest jobs Web site Zhaopin.com (招聘).
The drop was most pronounced in the Internet and online gaming sectors, where ads slid 23 percent and 30 percent respectively.
Last year marked the first time China’s giant IT and Internet sector — led by Tencent and Alibaba — has cut back on job ads since 2015, the study showed.
“The changing macroeconomic situation, a stream of regulatory improvements and the end of easy profit generated from large traffic volumes have ended the monstrous growth of the Internet industry and has gradually returned it to a more reasonable level,” the report said. “New Internet companies need to innovate to find new areas of growth.”
When asked about any potential job cuts, Alibaba said it is always investing in talent and hunting for the right people.
“Long-term strategic planning and continuous upgrades of our talent pool are central to Alibaba’s future,” the company said in an e-mail.
Analysts have already started to predict a slowdown for China’s technology sector as business confidence deteriorates and consumer spending ebbs.
Morgan Stanley estimates revenue among the nation’s Internet stocks it covers would grow 29 percent on average this year — dipping below 30 percent for the first time since at least 2015.
Economists see growth in China slowing to an annual pace of 6.2 percent this year, the weakest pace since 1990.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”