Rita Liao
TechCrunch
China
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Recent articles by Rita:
China’s cosmetics startup Yatsen to buy 35-year-old skincare brand Eve Lom –
In China’s cosmetics world, where foreign brands were historically revered, indigenous startups are increasingly winning over Gen-Z consumers with cheaper, more localized options. One of the rising stars is the direct-to-consumer brand Perfect Diary, which is owned by five-year-old startup Yatsen. Yatsen impressed the capital market with a $617 million initial public offering on NYSE […] → Read More
How China’s synthetic media startup Surreal nabs funding in 3 months –
What if we no longer needed cameras to make videos and can instead generate them through a few lines of coding? Advances in machine learning are turning the idea into a reality. We’ve seen how deepfakes swap faces in family photos and turn one’s selfies into famous video clips. Now entrepreneurs with AI research background […] → Read More
Qualcomm veteran to replace Alain Crozier as Microsoft Greater China boss –
Microsoft is getting a new leader for its Greater China business. Yang Hou, a former senior vice president at Qualcomm, will take over Alain Crozier as the chairman and chief executive officer for Microsoft Greater China Region, says a company announcement released Monday. After eight years at Qualcomm where he led sales and business development, Hou […] → Read More
Tim Hortons marks two years in China with Tencent investment –
Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and doughnut giant, has raised a new round of funding for its Chinese venture. The investment is led by Sequoia China with participation from Tencent, its digital partner in China, and Eastern Bell Capital. The round comes two years after Tim Hortons made its foray into China’s booming coffee industry. […] → Read More
Xiaomi further localizes India supply chain via BYD, DBG partnerships –
China’s Xiaomi had dominated the Indian smartphone market for three consecutive years until recently losing the top spot to Samsung. It has played by the Indian government’s rulebook to support domestic manufacturing, making smartphones in India rather than shipping them from its home country of China. Now it is further ramping up production in India […] → Read More
Chinese mobile games are gaining ground in the US –
Over the past year, the coronavirus crisis has spurred app usage in the United States as people stay indoors to limit contact with others. Mobile games particularly have enjoyed a boom, and among them, games from Chinese studios are gaining popularity. Games released on the U.S. App Store and Google Play Store raked in a […] → Read More
A race to reverse engineer Clubhouse raises security concerns –
As live audio chat app Clubhouse ascends in popularity around the world, concerns about its data practices also grow. The app is currently only available on iOS, so some developers set out in a race to create Android, Windows and Mac versions of the service. While these endeavors may not be ill-intentioned, the fact that […] → Read More
China’s Black Lake raises $77M to give factories a digital upgrade –
Zhou Yuxiang doesn’t have the typical profile for working in China’s manufacturing world. A soft-spoken yet incisive person in his early thirties, Zhou graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and went on to work in investment banking in Hong Kong, following the path of many Chinese overseas returnees. But a few years […] → Read More
TikTok’s China twin Douyin has 550 million search users, takes on Baidu –
The advance of short videos is reshaping how information is created, disseminated and consumed online. Snappy 15-second videos aren’t just for entertainment. On Chinese short-video apps Douyin and Kuaishou, people can get their daily dose of news, learn to cook, practice English, hunt for jobs, and seek practically any type of information from the platforms’ […] → Read More
Tesla summoned by Chinese regulators for quality concerns –
Tesla, which is seeing rapid growth in China as it ramps up local manufacturing capacity, has been called upon by the Chinese government for talks over quality issues in its electric cars. A group of Chinese authorities, including the country’s top market regulator, cyberspace watchdog and transportation authority, held talks with Tesla after consumers complained […] → Read More
Clubhouse is now blocked in China after a brief uncensored period –
Thousands of Chinese users suddenly found themselves unable to access Clubhouse on early Monday evening as the country prepared to start the week-long Lunar New Year holiday. Inside WeChat groups, Clubhouse users rushed to report the situation and help each other with ways to get back onto the red hot live audio app. Audio drop-in […] → Read More
China court accepts ByteDance case filing against Tencent over alleged monopoly –
ByteDance is bringing its battle with archrival Tencent to the court at a time when the Chinese government moves to curve the power of the country’s internet behemoths. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court has permitted a ByteDance lawsuit brought against Tencent to proceed, a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch. Upstart new media company ByteDance alleged […] → Read More
Will the Clubhouse model work in China? –
On Friday just past midnight, I stumbled across a Clubhouse room hosted by a well-known figure in the Chinese startup community, Feng Dahui. At half-past midnight, the room still had nearly 500 listeners, many of whom were engineers, product managers, and entrepreneurs from China. The discussion centered around whether Clubhouse, an app that lets people […] → Read More
Kuaishou, TikTok’s Chinese nemesis, surges 194% on IPO debut –
Kuaishou, a Chinese video app that’s largely underappreciated outside China, has just completed a massive initial public offering in Hong Kong. The app is by far the biggest rival for Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and unlike many Western video platforms that make money from ads and subscriptions, Kuaishou’s cash cow is its tipping business. Kuaishou’s […] → Read More
China’s national blockchain network embraces global developers –
While China bans cryptocurrency exchanges and initial coin offerings, the government is set to leverage the underpinning technology — often without the decentralized part. Blockchain, for instance, could help track the shipment of luxury goods and authenticate court evidence. In the process of adopting blockchain applications in its own interest, China also wants to become […] → Read More
Alibaba Cloud turns profitable after 11 years –
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, became profitable for the first time in the December quarter, the company announced in its earnings report. The firm’s cloud unit achieved positive adjusted EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) during the quarter, after being in business since 2009. The milestone is in […] → Read More
As contactless menu ordering becomes the norm amid COVID, China pushes back –
Digital ordering and paying at restaurants was already gaining much ground in China before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The tap-to-order method on a smartphone is part of the greater development in China where cash and physical documentation is increasingly being phased out. Many restaurants across large cities go as far as making digital menus mandatory, […] → Read More
New rule reins in China’s flourishing self-publishing space –
Despite China’s history of stringent media control, an industry of uninstitutionalized, individual publishers has managed to flourish on social media platforms like Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s Toutiao. These self-publishers are called “We Media” in the Chinese internet lexicon, denoting the independent power of citizen journalists and content creators. Meanwhile, self-publishers have always… → Read More
Hong Kong startup ICW eyes supply chain diversification demand amid trade war –
For American importers, finding suppliers these days can be challenging not only due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. The U.S. government’s entity list designations, human rights-related sanctions, among other trade blacklists targeting Chinese firms have also rattled U.S. supply chains. One young company called International Compliance Workshop, or ICW, is determined to make sourcing easier for… → Read More
Online wholesale retailer Boxed taps Aeon for Asia expansion –
Boxed, the New York-based online retailer that sells and delivers bulk-sized groceries, makes its foray into Asia by partnering with Aeon, one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar retail operators. Unlike its consumer-focused business in the U.S., which has been described as “Costco for millennials,” Boxed is exporting its nascent software-as-a-service solution to Aeon in Malaysia. As […] → Read More