China Digital Digest Weekly: Exploring the Chinese Digital Landscape
- ClickInsights
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Hi folks, we are back with our weekly edition of China’s Digital Digest, wherein we bring you weekly updates on China’s digital space. The report takes a quick glance at China’s complex and rapidly evolving social media landscape by providing updates on the latest happenings across the social media industry. Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. Alibaba Rises Most in 3 Years on Outlook For On-Demand Delivery And Cloud Business
Alibaba Group Holding jumped the most in more than three years, with the surge driven by optimism that the e-commerce juggernaut will survive cutthroat competition in on-demand delivery and that its artificial intelligence segment is gaining further traction.
The stock surged 19 percent to HK$137.10, its biggest gain since March 16, 2022. It was also the best performer in the Hang Seng Index, which rose 2.2 percent. Alibaba’s American depositary receipts (ADRs) jumped 13 percent to US$135 in New York, defying a broad sell-off in US technology stocks.
2. Alibaba Confident of Winning Instant Commerce War as Quarterly Profit Rises
Alibaba Group Holding, China’s e-commerce and cloud computing services giant, reported a 78 percent surge in profit for the June quarter, while “robust AI demand” led to a 26 percent revenue growth for its cloud business.
Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders advanced 78 percent to 43.1 billion yuan (US$6 billion) in the period, up from 24.3 billion yuan a year earlier, primarily due to “mark-to-market changes from our equity investments and gains from the disposal of the local consumer service business of Trendyol”, the Hangzhou-based company said. That was better than the 30.2 billion yuan expected by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
3. Meituan Releases AI Model to Take on Alibaba, DeepSeek
On-demand local services giant Meituan has become the latest Chinese Big Tech company to release an open-source large language model (LLM) to market, more than two years after it acquired mainland AI start-up Light Year for US$281 million.
Meituan, the long-standing leader of China’s food delivery market, released and open-sourced its own LLM, called LongCat-Flash-Chat, via artificial intelligence developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as the model’s official website. According to the model’s technical report, LongCat-Flash-Chat features 560 billion total parameters – the variables used to define and manipulate the input and output of models – and the so-called Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture.
4. Meituan Sales Weaken, Profit Plummets Amid ‘irrational’ Delivery Price War
Chinese on-demand local services giant Meituan said its second-quarter earnings fell sharply, as it faced off against Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com in a costly delivery price war.
Meituan reported weaker-than-expected revenue of 91.8 billion yuan (US$12.8 billion) for the quarter ended June 30. That was up 11.7 percent from 82.2 billion yuan a year earlier, but fell short of the 93.7 billion yuan estimate by analysts. Net profit for the period plunged 96.8 percent to 365.3 million yuan from 11.4 billion yuan a year earlier. The firm’s adjusted net profit fell 89 percent to 1.5 billion yuan from 13.6 billion yuan.
5. China’s Social Media Sites Rush to Abide By AI-Generated Content Labelling Law
Major Chinese social media platforms, including Tencent Holdings’ WeChat and ByteDance-owned Douyin, have launched new features to abide by a new law that mandates labelling of all artificial intelligence-generated content online.
The law, which was issued in March, requires explicit and implicit labels for AI-generated text, images, audio, video and other virtual content. Explicit markings must be clearly visible to users, while implicit identifiers – such as digital watermarks – should be embedded in the metadata.
Wrapping Up
The vast and diverse nature of the Chinese Social Media space makes it incredibly challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments taking place. However, China’s Digital Digest brings you all the latest updates from there to keep you abreast of all the evolving trends.
To delve deeper into the findings of our latest report, click here.