I wrote three pieces this week and only noticed afterwards that they ask one question. Who holds the thing everyone else needs, and will they share it? On China’s AI phones it is the right to act inside the big apps. At WeChat it is the merchants and the payments, and at Alibaba it is its own chips.
What I cannot tell yet is whether any of these gates moves on a set date. The nearest date I know is October 15. Until then, ByteDance’s Doubao assistant stays out of Chinese apps that have not opted in.
OPEN UNTIL TUESDAY
Last October I wrote that Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hubei had set up robot funds worth more than Rmb 26bn. Fund managers were talking about tenfold returns, and portfolio companies were lining up to list. The question I asked was whether the listings would clear.
This week CNBC reported that China’s securities regulator is raising the bar for humanoid robot IPOs, citing three people familiar with its thinking. The guidance is unwritten, and the regulator has not commented.
China’s Robot Funds Bet on Exits, Not Engineering is open to all readers until Tuesday, October 6, noon Beijing time.
THIS WEEK, FOR PAID READERS
Who Gets Alibaba’s Next AI Chips: Cloud Customers or Qwen?: Alibaba moved its next Chinese AI chip up two quarters. Who gets the first batch?
China’s AI Phone Is Becoming a Switchboard: A Chinese phone assistant can open WeChat. Who decides what it may do inside?
WeChat’s Agent Is Not China’s Muse: Investors compared Tencent’s WeChat agent to Meta’s Muse. I checked Tencent’s developer code instead.
Next week: my analysis of why two Chinese carmakers are taking ground back from Huawei and CATL. On September 7, Li Auto told buyers of its MEGA minivan that orders from 3pm would get battery cells designed by Li Auto, not CATL’s.
The robot-fund piece closes Tuesday, October 6. Paid readers keep it, along with more than 230 other analyses, every week.
$150/year, or $20/month.
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