Market battles between Chinese tech leaders
Tencent and
Alibaba over China's fast-growing e-commerce market play out in the recent U.S. $1.3 billion IPO of Chinese fashion retailer
Mogu --
the 38th China-based company to go public in the U.S. in a record 2018!
After years of keeping close within their original core business -- e-commerce for
Alibaba and social media and gaming for
Tencent -- these two Chinese tech titans are duking it out.
Mogu rejected Alibaba's investment offers early on but
Tencent soon angled in.
Tencent is ganging up on
Alibaba with other killer moves such as investing in red-hot team-buying mobile shopping app P
induoduo.
Alibaba still claims a leading 58 percent share of China
huge $1.1 trillion online shopping sector -- far larger than the U.S. at $713 billion. China's e-commerce market is projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022.
FUNDS
China's top unicorn
ByteDance, an app maker of
Toutiao for today's news and
Tik Tok for short, quirky videos, is putting 20% of its own capital toward a new ByteDance $1.45 billion fund,
The Information reports, to invest in AI and digital content. That would put in the same league as
Xiaomi that has a similar fund investing in closely aligned startups. The next step for the Beijing-based go-getter
ByteDance could be to launch a messaging app competing with China's highly popular social networking app
WeChat.
