Welcome back,
I’m just getting over the dreaded post-event lurgy following Devcon in Bangkok. It was quite surreal to see such a huge event—an estimated 10,000 went to the show and thousands more came to join side events—on my home turf. Bangkok has huge potential for events, and this just proved it.
On to this week’s issue—Apple is showing its teeth in an app store/operating system battle in China against local favourite Huawei. Sony is looking to buy the firm behind the hit game Elden Ring. India’s Zepto raised more money (again) and it appears to be nailing down the rhetoric that it hopes can rapidly take it to a homegrown IPO.
All of that and more in this week’s issue.
Have a great week,
Jon
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Apple doesn’t often speak about its business in China, usually that’s only when it needs to sway opinion or is perhaps forced to do so given it is its third largest market worldwide. So it’s notable that Apple did reveal numbers for its App Store in China, albeit via a university report that is unclear whether it endorsed:
Apple China on Monday published an article on its official website that cited a report by a Shanghai University of Finance and Economics researcher, saying that the local App Store paid over 95 per cent of the 3.76 trillion yuan (US$519 billion) in revenue it generated last year to Chinese developers and various companies.
“We’re proud that the investments we make in the App Store have helped it become a powerful growth engine for local businesses of all sizes,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook wrote on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo. He said that the company is committed to the success of entrepreneurs across China.
Apple has been under pressure in China where Huawei is pushing its Honor US hard. The Chinese firm said last week that it is aiming to reach 100,000 apps on its store within the next year as it takes advantage of US-China political unrest to super charge its business in China. US sanctions forced Huawei to develop its own OS, and now it is actively courting major players like WeChat and Douyin with incentives as it tries to funnel the public into its device using software.
Elsewhere in Asia, Apple raised its investment offer in Indonesia from $10M to nearly $100M over two years as it bids to lift a sales ban on its newest iPhone 16 in the country.
Earnings season is coming to a close with more big firms putting out numbers:
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Baidu Q3 revenue dropped 3% to $4.6B as China’s weak economy hit online advertising link
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That downturn saw PDD post weaker-than-expected sales of 99.4B yuan ($13.7B), below the 102.8B yuan forecast link
Reuters reported that Sony is in talks to acquire Kadokawa, the Japanese media giant behind FromSoftware which owns hit game Elden Ring, in a deal it says could conclude within weeks. Kadokawa confirmed that an offer is on the table.
Kadokawa does a lot more than just Elden Ring:
Kadokawa is a Japanese media conglomerate that owns a huge array of businesses, across manga, anime, tourism, video streaming, and some of the most significant names in Japanese games development. That includes Spike Chunsoft, the developer behind Danganronpa, Mystery Dungeon, and most recently, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, as well as Acquire, co-developers of Octopath Traveler and, intriguingly, the developers of the just-released Nintendo exclusive, Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
If the deal goes through, it would add Sony to the enviable amount of studios under its ownership, which has over a dozen studios across the world. It also raises the potential for future FromSoftware titles to be PlayStation exclusives.
Zepto has done it again. The quick commerce leader from India raised a further $350M, its third funding round in six months—it had already raised $1B since June excluding this new investment.
The deal had been in the pipeline for some time, and widely-reported—it comes at a flat $5B valuation but with a tranche of domestic Indian investment firms. That looks to be linked with plans to go public, which have also been widely-delegraphed in the press. The plan looks like being next year, which would cap a meteoric rise for the company, not only has it raised a huge amount quickly but it could go public much faster than the average startup in India.
But for all that haste there are concerns that its business model, which is being widely replicated by rivals such as Reliance and Zomato, is killing kiranas, India’s traditional neighbourhood vendors. That’s a narrative Zepto will need to manage if it is to go public, or raise more money, and it already has a catchy soundbite.
Zepto’s young CEO Aadit Palicha claims quick commerce is not a destroyer, and that it will create more jobs than the Indian railways. He also asserted that Zepto is an Indian company run by Indian executives, unlike Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart which are controlled by US entities.
This looks fairly ominous for China tech after Zhong Shanshan, the country’s richest man, criticised major tech firms for fueling online attacks and sparking a price war that hurt his bottled-water empire—he specifically called out PDD and its disruptive pricing link
Robotaxi firm Pony AI, backed by the likes of Toyota, is looking to raise up to $260M in a US IPO that would value it at $4.55B link
Uber is among those who might invest in the Pony AI IPO link
TikTok CEO Shou Chew has reached out to Elon Musk seeking insights on the incoming administration and tech policy as the company faces a potential US ban link
China’s top tech firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Meituan, are expanding in Silicon Valley to hire AI talent, despite US restrictions aimed at curbing China’s tech growth link
Alibaba aims to raise $5B in dual currency bond deal, sources say link
Alibaba’s Jiang Fan, a highly-rated executive who was engulfed in a scandal in 2020, continued his redemption after being appointed to oversee the firm’s entire e-commerce operations—he’s now the company’s third-most powerful figure behind only CEO Eddie Wu and Chairman Joe Tsai link
SF, China’s largest express delivery courier which includes Xiaomi among its investors, is going public in a Hong Kong IPO that could raise close to $800M at a planned valuation of $28B link
Chinese smartphone companies are pushing high end devices in Europe—brands like Realme, Oppo, and Honor are targeting rivals Samsung and Apple with more sophisticated handsets link
Kaifu Lee, formerly head of Google China and a noted AI academic, had no issue raising money for his AI firm 01.AI last year (it became a unicorn in just eight months) but raising from US investors has been trickier for Rhymes AI—a Singapore startup he helped start—who have passed due to links with China-based 01.AI link
Chinese lab DeepSeek unveiled DeepSeek-R1, a “reasoning” AI model designed to rival OpenAI’s o1 which claims to fact-check itself but takes a little longer to respond to more complicated questions link
Xiaomi’s EV business helped it beat quarterly estimates as revenue rose 31% to reach $12.8B—with around 10% coming from the autonomous unit link
The EU plans to require Chinese companies to transfer IP to European businesses in exchange for subsidies as part of a stricter trade regime for clean technologies—new criteria, mandating that Chinese businesses establish factories in Europe and share technological know-how, will be introduced when Brussels invites bids for €1B in grants to develop batteries in December link
A number of startups that passed through incubators from Google and Microsoft have worked with units of the Chinese government on censorship and surveillance technology, according to a report from Rest of World link
CrowdStrike has uncovered a China-linked hacking group, Liminal Panda, targeting telecom networks since 2020 to spy on text messages and call metadata link
Shanghai-based SpaceSail has inked a deal with Brazil to provide satellite internet in the region as it bids to challenge Starlink in emerging markets like Latin America link
India’s competition watchdog fined WhatsApp $25.4M and barred it from sharing user data with Meta units for five years due to anti-trust violations (Meta plans to appeal) link
Addverb Technologies, which previously raised $132M from the likes of Reliance, said it plans to launch its first humanoid robots in 2025 with a focus on fashion, retail and energy—bringing India’s challenge to Chinese and American robotics companies link
Tata Electronics is acquiring a 60% stake in Pegatron’s sole iPhone plant in the country, forming a joint venture to boost its role as an Apple supplier link
Foxconn has ordered the hiring agents that help recruit iPhone assembly workers in India to remove age, gender and marital criteria as well as the manufacturer’s name in job advertisements link
Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal is part of an investment vehicle that plans to invest $65M in the company at a valuation of $3.8B as it prepares for IPO—Oyo’s valuation peaked at $10B in 2019 but this new valuation is up from $2.3B when it raised in June link
India’s central bank plans to rival AWS, Microsoft, Google and others by piloting cloud storage and data services for financial companies next year link
In a symbolic win for India, Xiaomi will replace its India-based app store with PhonePe’s Indus AppStore from next year link
Nutrition startup HealthKart’s valuation reached $500M based on a secondary investment of $153M link
Eyewear startup Lenskart is in the process of raising $200M-$300M at a valuation of $6B, a 20% jump on its last round link
Payment startup PeLocal, which enables e-commerce through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, raised $2M led by Unicorn India Ventures link
Arzooo, an Indian startup aiming to bring e-commerce to physical stores, sold its assets in a distressed sale to Moksha Group—its valuation previously peaked at $310M link
OneCell Diagnostics, an AI-driven cancer diagnostics startup based in India and the US, raised $16M to make precision oncology diagnostics more accessible and affordable link
Web3 gaming startup Kratos Gamer Network raised $10M at a valuation of $500M link
The Philippine Army is enlisting young tech talent to combat cyber threats, many linked to China, as the nation remains highly vulnerable online link
Meta said it has removed more than 2M accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the UAE link
South Korean police confirmed that hackers related to the North Korean government were responsible for a 2019 hack that stole 342,000 Ethereum tokens (worth $41.5M at the time, over $1B now) from a Korean exchange link
Kioxia, a chip firm formerly known as Toshiba Memory which is now owned by a consortium that includes Bain, is preparing to hold an IPO that could value it at nearly $5B link
Japan is planning a $65B boost in microchips and AI to reclaim its global tech leadership and address challenges from its ageing population link
BlueSky appears to be blocked in Pakistan just as the Twitter alternative got a boost of new users joining link
Bhutan has been mining Bitcoin for the last five years and those holdings are now worth over $1B thanks to a recent market rally following the US Presidential election link
