Google is continuing to test new strategies in China after the U.S. search giant released its first mini program for WeChat, the country’s hugely popular messaging app.

WeChat is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese people daily for services that stretch beyond chat to include mobile payments, bill paying, food delivery and more. Tencent, the company that operates WeChat, added mini programs last year and they effectively operate like apps that are attached to the service. That means that users bypass Google Play or Apple’s App Store and install them from WeChat.

Earlier this year, Tencent added support for games — “mini games” — and the Chinese firm recently said that over one million mini programs have been created to date. Engagement is high, with some 500 million WeChat users interacting with at least one each month.

WeChat has become the key distribution channel in China and that’s why Google is embracing it with its first mini program — 猜画小歌, a game that roughly translates to ‘Guess My Sketch.’ There’s no English announcement but the details can be found in this post on Google’s Chinese blog, which includes the QR code to scan to get the game.

The app is a take on games like Zynga’s Draw Something, which puts players into teams to guess what the other is drawing. Google, however, is adding a twist. Each player teams up with an AI and then battles against their friends and their AIs. You can find an English version of the game online here.

The main news here isn’t the game, of course, but that Google is embracing mini programs, which have been christened as a threat to the Google Play Store itself.

‘When in China… play by local rules’ and Google has taken that to heart this year.

The company recently introduced a Chinese version of its Files Go Android device management app which saw it join forces with four third-party app stores in China in order to gain distribution. This sketching game has lower ambitions but, clearly, it’ll be a learning experience for Google that might prompt it to introduce more significant apps or services via WeChat in the future.

Indeed, Google has been cozying up to Tencent lately after inking a patent deal with the Chinese internet giant, investing in its close ally JD.com and combining on investment deals together, including biotech startup XtalPi.

That’s one side of a new initiative to be more involved in China, where it has been absent since 2010 after redirecting its Chinese search service to Hong Kong in the face of government pressure. In other moves, it has opened an AI lab in Beijing and a more modest office in Shenzhen while it is bringing its startup demo day event to China for the first time with a Shanghai event in September.

Finally, in a touch of irony, Google’s embrace of WeChat’s ‘app store-killing’ mini programs platform comes just hours before the EU is expected to levy a multibillion-euro penalty onit for abusing its dominant position on mobile via Android.

Brazil’s macroeconomic picture may be gloomy, but technology investors still see hope in the nation’s burgeoning technology sector — and a recent $124 million financing for the mobile conglomerate Movile is the latest proof that that the pace of investment isn’t slowing down.

Brazil was already the hottest spot for technology investment throughout Latin America — with Sao Paulo drawing in the majority of the record-breaking $1 billion in financing that the region’s startups attracted in 2017. And with this latest funding for Movile, led by Naspers, that trend looks likely to continue.

Indeed, Naspers investments in Movile (supplemented by co-investors like Innova, which participated in the most recent round) have been one of the driving forces sustaining the Brazilian startup community. In all, the South African technology media and investment conglomerate has invested $375 million into Movile over the course of several rounds that likely value the company at close to $1 billion.

Another Brazilian tech company, the financial services giant Nubank, has raised around $528 million (according to Crunchbase) and is valued at roughly $2 billion, putting it squarely in the “unicorn club”, as the Latin American Venture Capital Association noted, earlier this year.

Both chief executive Fabricio Bloisi and a spokesperson from Naspers declined to comment on Movile’s valuation. “My dream is not to become a unicorn my dream is to become much bigger than that,” Bloisi said in an interview.

Nubank and Movile are the two most recent privately held independent companies to achieve or approach unicorn status in Brazil, but they’re not alone in reaching or approaching the billion dollar threshold in Latin America. MercadoLibre was an early runaway success for the region (hailing from Argentina) and the ride hailing service 99Taxis was acquired by the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth Didi for a roughly $1 billion dollar valuation last year.

All of this points to an appetite for Latin American tech that Movile is hoping it can seize upon with its new $124 million in financing.

The company is looking to expand its food delivery business iFood, its payment company, Zoop, and its ticketing platform, Sympla.

Both Movile and Naspers look to Chinese companies as their model and inspiration for growth, with Bloisi saying that he’s eyeing the eventual public offering for Meituan — the Chinese online retailer as the company to emulate in the market these days.

“The Chinese companies are doing extremely well and Movile is very similar to a Chinese company,” says Bloisi. And the company’s buy and build strategy certainly mirrors that of a tech business in the world’s largest emerging market economy moreso than it does a typical U.S. startup.

That extends to Movile’s investment in the tech ecosystem in its native Brazil and the broader Latin American region. Already the company boasts 150 million users per month across its application ecosystem. Through on-click payment services provided by Zoop, Movile offers a WePay and WeChat like experience for buyers in Latin America, Bloisi said.

It’s a playbook that the company’s backers have run before — with WeChat. Naspers came to prominence and untold riches by being an early backer of Tencent who’s WeChat and WePay applications have become the backbone of mobile commerce in China.

Now it’s looking to replicate that with Movile in Brazil and beyond. Like its Chinese counterparts, Movile is more than just one of the largest startup companies in the Brazilian ecosystem… it’s also a big investor. Indeed, subsidiaries like iFood began as small investments the company made in promising businesses.

It was with its last $82 million round of financing from Naspers and other co-investors that Movile backed Mercadoni, a Colombian grocery business, and its payment services play in Brazil — Zoop (which is one of the company’s main areas of interest going forward).

For Bloisi, that future outlook seems pretty bright. “Our confidence is extremely high,” he says of the recent financing. “For me it’s an indicator that things are growing. There was a hot moment in Latin America in 2010-2012. Then there was a recession, now while Movile is raising more there are also many more players,” who are coming to market with convincing offerings for investors. 

Movile itself isn’t afraid to let its checkbook do the talking for it when it comes to confidence in the market for online retail and commerce in Brazil. Bloisi estimates that his company has made nearly 35 transactions over the past few years, and will continue to invest heavily in the sector.

“Many of our business are growing at over 100% per year,” Bloisi said.

Investors like Martin Tschopp the chief executive of Naspers can’t complain about that kind of growth across multiple business units.

As the executive said in a satement:

“Naspers has been a long-term partner of Movile because of its ability to build transformative mobile businesses in Latin America and beyond. Movile has great expertise in identifying high-potential companies in consumer segments with opportunity for massive growth, including food delivery with iFood, which is why we continue to support the company.”

That sentiment, an optimism about the future of technology enabled businesses in Brazil and the broader Latin American region has captured investors’ imagination from billionaire backed offices like the Russian investment firm DST and large multinational U.S.-based players like Goldman Sachs.

As HIllel Moerman, head of Goldman’s private capital investment group told The Financial Times, “The [venture capital] ecosystem is still nascent compared to the US and other international markets — therefore there is a large opportunity for start-ups.”

Beyond the relative maturity of the venture community, there are macroeconomic forces at play that continue to make the Brazilian market attractive.

“Brazil has a large market, a pretty tech savvy population with attractive demographics and decent engineering and computing talent. You have all the right ingredients for an ecosystem to develop,” Tom Stafford, an investor with DST Global, told the British paper in an interview.

 

Fresh from Spotify’s unique direct listing in the U.S., another huge streaming service is about to follow suit and go public in America.

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) has nothing like the global profile of Spotify, but China’s top streaming service is heading for the U.S. public markets according to a filing made this weekend by parent company Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese internet giant which plans to spin the music business out.

At this point, specific financial details around the listing aren’t being released, but past reports have suggested that it could raise as much as $1 billion and give TME a valuation of $30 billion. That would be quite a jump from its most recent $12 billion valuation and certainly not guaranteed given that others from China, including Xiaomi, has fallen short of ambitious IPO valuation targets.

But there’s precedent here since Tencent made a similar move last year when it broke off China Literature, its digital books business unit, and listed it in Hong Kong with some success. Hong Kong had also been mooted as a destination for TME, but the Tencent filing stated the firm’s intention to “spin-off by way of a separate listing… on a recognized stock exchange in the United States.”

While it seems unlikely that Tencent will follow Spotify and adopt a direct listing — which ditches with the conventional process of an IPO price and engaging banks — it may well call on its rival for pointers since they are both mutual investors.

The duo announced an equity swap deal in December that could see them team up on business in the future. At the time it was certainly a sign that both sides were getting into shape to go public, and TME’s IPO would wrap that up.

The evidence is increasingly clear: 2018 is the year of the Chinese venture deal.

With half of the year now complete, China is driving ahead of Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States on venture capital dollars invested into startups, according to a number of data sources including Crunchbase, China Money Network, and Pitchbook.

These sorts of top line numbers are always driven by large deals, and the Chinese VC market is no exception. Monster rounds this year have included a $1.9 billion investment from Softbank Vision Fund into Manbang Group, a truck hailing startup formed from the merger of two competitors, Yumanman and Huochebang, as well as Ant Financial, which raised a whopping $14 billion from investors.

While China hasn’t overtaken the U.S. in terms of total VC rounds, it has seen spectacular growth in deal volume. Crunchbase’s analysis shows an almost four-fold increase in the number of venture capital rounds completed last quarter in China compared to the same quarter last year. That’s in comparison to a dismal seed funding market in Silicon Valley, where seed volume has dropped off of a cliff over the past few years, down by 60% or more by some estimates.

That’s a rather linear look, though, of an industry that is facing extreme flux. Venture capital today is being wholly redefined by new crowdsourcing models and of course, the rise of blockchain and the world of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). On the latter, billions of dollars have been raised by blockchain projects, perhaps most notoriously in recent weeks by EOS and Telegram. Institutional capital still matters, but it isn’t the sole source of funding anymore, even at the growth stage. That makes VC aggregate data much less compelling than it might have been in the past.

However, what these aggregates do show is the changing power dynamics between the U.S. and China, particularly in critical future growth markets in the emerging world.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the burgeoning strength of China’s high-flying tech companies. While venture firms are of course widely present in China, it is the country’s largest tech companies that are driving much of the venture investment in the mainland ecosystem. As China Money Network noted recently, “Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu … ranked as the first, fourth and eighth most active investors in [April], inking 11, 5 and 4 deals respectively.”

The aggressive investment strategies of Chinese tech firms was recently observed by Sequoia partner Mike Moritz in the Financial Times. In his analysis, Moritz wrote, “Between 2015 and 2017, the five biggest US tech groups (especially Apple and Microsoft) spent $228bn on stock buybacks and dividends, Bloomberg data shows. During the same period, the top five Chinese tech companies spent just $10.7bn and ploughed the rest of their excess cash into investments that broaden their footprint and influence.“

Context can explain some of this behavior, but there is also an outlook difference across the Pacific that is important to appreciate. American venture firms are robust, and Google and other tech companies don’t feel as compelled as their Chinese counterparts to step into the game themselves in order to finance the innovation industry.

Yet, one can’t help but feel that a different concept of ambition is being adopted by American companies — one that looks internally for growth rather than externally in new markets.

That’s certainly not the case in China, where companies are looking in both directions. Moritz again: “Most Chinese activity is outside the US, with Tencent and Alibaba building vast constellations of satellites. Tencent has more than 600 investments, while Alibaba has around 400 — totals that almost make Japan’s SoftBank look like a penny-pinching slowpoke.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, we see a complete pull back from much of the emerging world. The drastic reported cutback in Facebook’s efforts in the emerging world is just the latest example of this myopia.

The old line about venture capitalists still holds true: most don’t want to invest more than 40 miles from their house. While many Silicon Valley-based VCs have since extended that geography to the rest of the United States, only an extraordinary few have invested in more than a handful of companies in the developing world. That has left open opportunities for investment in countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, where the next set of internet users are coming online.

For founders, focusing on aggregate numbers is useless. Investors are either interested in a startup or not, and while macro factors can provide context for a fundraise, they don’t typically drive the outcome. But when it comes to evaluating the corporate strategy of tech giants, they are far more impactful. The U.S. can’t continue to look inward and expect the high rates of growth we have seen in the tech sector over the past two decades. Only new, global markets are going to be the driver of prosperity, and right now, China has its money where the action is.

Airwallex, a three-year-old fintech startup focused on international payments for SMEs and businesses, is putting itself on the map after it raised an $80 million Series B round.

Based of out of Melbourne, but with six offices in Asia and other parts of the world, Airwallex’s new funding round is the second largest financing deal for an Australian startup in history. The round was led by existing investors Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese internet giant, and Sequoia China. Other participants included China’s Hillhouse, Horizons Ventures — the fund from Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-Shing — Indonesia-based Central Capital Ventura (BCA) and Australia’s Square Peg, a firm from Paul Bassat who took recruitment firm Seek to IPO and is one of Australia’s highest-profile founders.

The financing takes Airwallex to $102 million raised. Tencent led a $13 million Series A in May 2017, while Square Peg added $6 million more via a Series A+ in December. Mastercard is also a backer; the finance giant uses Airwallex to handle its “Send” product while Tencent uses the service to power an overseas remittance service for its WeChat app.

Airwallex handles cross-border transactions for companies that do business in multiple countries using international currencies. So it’s not unlike a Transferwise-style service for SMEs that lack the capital to develop a sophisticated (and expensive) international banking system of their own.

The service uses wholesale FX rates to route overseas payments back to a client’s domestic bank and is capable of processing “thousands of transactions per second,” according to the company. A use case example might include helping a China-based seller return money earned in the U.S. or Europe via Amazon or other e-commerce services, or route sales revenue back directly from their own website.

Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang (far right) on stage at TechCrunch Shenzhen in 2017

China is a key market for Airwallex — which was started by four Australian-Chinese founders — as well as the wider Asian region, and in particular Australia, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. With this new capital, Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang said the company will increase its focus on Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, whilst also extending its business in Europe (where it has a London-based office) and pushing into North America.

Product R&D is shared across Melbourne and Shanghai, while Hong Kong accounts for business development, compliance and more, Zhang explained. However, Airwallex’s locations in London and San Francisco are likely to account for most of the upcoming headcount growth planned following this funding. Right now, Airwallex has around 100 staff, according to Zhang.

The company is also aiming to expand its product range, too.

The firm is in the process of applying for a virtual banking license in Hong Kong, a third-party payment license in mainland China, and a cross-border Chinese yuan license. One goal, Zhang revealed, is to offer working capital loans to SMEs to help them to scale their businesses to the next level. Airwallex is working with an undisclosed partner to underwrite deals in the future. Zhang explained that the company sees a gap in the market since banks don’t have access to critical data on clients for loan assessments.

More generally, he’s bullish for the future despite Brexit and the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

“The trade war gives the Chinese yuan a lot of vitality, and we’ve seen more demand in the market. China’s belt road initiative has really taken off, too, and we’re seeing the impact in many many of our payment corridors,” he explained. “Business has been booming, especially as traditional offline SMEs start to move online and go from domestic to global.”

“We want to be the backbone to support these new opportunities for businesses,” Zhang added.

There’s a rare moment of cheer for floundering electric car maker Faraday Future after it landed a new investor and a fresh commitment of capital.

Evergrande Health, a division of Hong Kong-listed Evergrande, has taken a 45 percent stake in Faraday Future in a deal worth a total of $2 billion. Evergrande Health has taken over an investment commitment agreed to last November by Season Smart Limited, an investor that swooped in to save Faraday Future when its cash was on the verge of running out.

Season Smart invested an initial tranche of $800 million, according to filings, but now Evergrande Health has taken that over for around $860 million, or HK$6.75 billion. Beyond that money, Evergrande Health has a commitment to complete the overall deal by investing $600 million by the end 2019, and a further $600 million by the end of 2020. 

Aside from Evergrande Health’s 45 percent share, existing investors own a combined 33 percent with the remaining 22 percent allocated to Faraday Future’s 1,000 employees as part of an incentive program. On the subject of staff, founder Yueting Jia (known as JT) will become Faraday Future’s global CEO with immediate effect.

It was widely reported that he was keen to keep majority ownership and remain in charge, but it looks like he’s had to settle for the latter only with this deal — but hey that beats being in the deadpool.

Faraday Future, which is technically a U.S. firm but is heavily backed by Chinese money, said the deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) after the initial agreement from investors in November.

“FF will continue to use the committed funds to accomplish our top priority — finalizing the development and delivering the first production vehicle, FF 91 to both US and China markets,” the company said in a statement.

“The investment will also support Faraday Future to expand its product pipeline, develop cutting-edge technologies and grow the business rapidly in the global marketplace, including our manufacturing facilities in Hanford, California and in Guangzhou Nansha, Guangdong Province, China,” it added.

The deal is a rare boost for Faraday Future which was founded in 2014 as a rival to Tesla but has struggled to deliver on its hype and promise.

The company unveiled its vision for electric cars — the FF 91 — at a glitzy launch event in CES last year, but 2017 was a year to forget.

Following on from reports of financial issues with parent company LeEco in late 2016, Faraday Future paused construction of its new factory and then scaled back its product line due to financial concerns. The company was sued by a visual effects team it didn’t pay and then, when the cash crunch really hit home, it canceled plans for an assembly plant in California and went back on a $1 billion project to develop a massive factory in the Nevada desert.

After abandoning plans for a tailor-made factory, it later inked a deal on a more general facility in Hanford, California.

The drama hasn’t ended for YT, who first founded LeEco, however . He’s been under pressure in his native China over debts that have piled up — to the sum of $890 million — for his Leshi Internet video streaming division. Tencent and JD.com, two large Chinese internet firms, invested in LeEco’s smart TV unit earlier this year, while the parent firm was previously bailed out by property company Sunac in early 2017.

Tencent, the $500-billion Chinese internet giant, is increasing its focus on open source after it became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation.

The company has long been associated with the foundation and Linux generally, it is a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s deep learning program that launched earlier this year, and now as a platinum member (the highest tier) it will take a board of directors seat and work more closely with the organization. That works two ways, with Tencent pledging to offer “further support and resources” to foundation projects and communities, while the Chinese firm itself will also tap into the foundation’s expertise and experience.

Along those lines, the company said it will contribute its open source microservices project called TARS and an open source name service project (Tseer) to The Linux Foundation. It added that an open source AI project — Angel — will be contributed to the deep learning foundation.

“We are honored to be a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation. Open source is core Tencent’s technical strategy,” Liu Xin, general manager of Tencent’s Mobile Internet Group said in a statement.

Other platinum members include Cisco, Huawei, Microsoft, AT&T, Samsung and IBM.

Earlier this year, Tencent joined another open source industry body — the Open Compute Project (OCP) community — as part of a push for open source in the hardware space.

Tencent’s chief rival Alibaba also maintains a large presence in the open source community.

Alibaba is a gold member since last year, but more than that it has invested resources into projects directly as part of a push for its cloud computing service Alicloud. The Chinese firm led a $27 million investment in MariaDB, which became its first cloud investment outside of China. At home, its Alicloud-focused deals have included investments in cloud storage provider Qiniu and big data firm Dt Dream.

After months of speculation, Meituan, the largest service booking app in China, confirmed that it has filed for a public offering. The company’s IPO application was submitted to the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier today and is being sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. A spokesperson for Meituan said the company is currently not disclosing information about fundraising amount or valuation. Reuters reports that Meituan wants to raise more than $4 billion.

Meituan was created after Meituan and Dianping, two competitors in the group deals space, merged in 2015 (it is still formally known was Meituan Dianping). Since then, the company has added more services to become China’s leader in O2O (online-to-offline), a catchphrase for goods and services that are purchased online, but bring people into brick and mortar businesses, like movie ticket bookings.

One interesting aspect of the merger is that it brought together two archrivals, Alibaba and Tencent. Alibaba was one of Meituan’s investors, while Tencent backed Dianping. Since then, Alibaba has sold off most of its Meituan Dianping stake to focus on Koubei, its own O2O app, while Tencent has maintained an investment relationship with the company. For example, it led Meituan’s $4 billion Series C last October.

Meituan initially focused on restaurant reservations and food delivery, before expanding into more local services to create what it describes as a “one-stop super app” that allows users to buy movie tickets, make spa and salon appointments, book transportation and hotel rooms, and even pay for bike-sharing program MoBike, which Meituan acquired for $2.7 billion in April. The company says one advantage of its business model is customer conversion between verticals. For example, it claims over 80% of its new hotel booking consumers first began using the app for food delivery or restaurant reservations.

In its announcement today, Meituan said it currently has 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants. Over the past three years, its revenue grew from 4 billion RMB in 2015, to 13 billion RMB in 2016, before hitting 33.9 billion RMB (about $5.2 billion) in 2017. Meanwhile, its gross transaction value went from 161 billion RMB in 2015 to 237 billion RMB in 2016, then 357 billion RMB (about $54.8 billion) in 2017. Meituan also said that it’s adjusted net loss dropped from 5.9 billion RMB in 2015 to 2.9 billion RMB (about $430 million) in 2017.

Google has been increasing its presence in China in recent times, and today it has continued that push by agreeing to a strategic partnership with e-commerce firm JD.com which will see Google purchase $550 million of shares in the Chinese firm.

Google has made investments in China, released products there and opened up offices that include an AI hub, but now it is working with JD.com largely outside of China. In a joint release, the companies said they would “collaborate on a range of strategic initiatives, including joint development of retail solutions” in Europe, the U.S. and Southeast Asia.

The goal here is to merge JD.com’s experience and technology in supply chain and logistics — in China, it has opened warehouses that use robots rather than workers — with Google’s customer reach, data and marketing to produce new kinds of online retail.

Initially, that will see the duo team up to offer JD.com products for sale on the Google Shopping platform across the word, but it seems clear that the companies have other collaborations in mind for the future.

JD.com is valued at around $60 billion, based on its NASDAQ share price, and the company has partnerships with the likes of Walmart and it has invested heavily in automated warehouse technology, drones and other ‘next-generation’ retail and logisitics.

The move for a distribution platform like Google to back a service provider like JD.com is interesting since the company, through search and advertising, has relationships with a range of e-commerce firms including JD.com’s arch rival Alibaba.

But it is a sign of the times for Google, which has already developed relationships with JD.com and its biggest backer Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese internet giant. All three companies have backed Go-Jek, the ride-hailing challenger in Southeast Asia, while Tencent and Google previously inked a patent sharing partnership and have co-invested in startups such as Chinese AI startup XtalPi.

Naspers, the South Africa-based firm that famously backed Chinese giant Tencent in its infancy, is in talks to invest in Singapore-based startup Carousell, according to two sources with knowledge of discussions.

Carousell offers a mobile app that combines listings with peer-to-peer selling across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That makes it well-aligned with Naspers’ portfolio, which features some of the world’s largest classifieds services including OLX, which covers 45 countries, Letgo in the U.S. and Avito in Russia.

TechCrunch understands that Naspers is pursuing a deal with Carousell with a view to making it the firm’s key play in Southeast Asia and other parts of the APAC region.

Discussions are at a relatively early stage so it isn’t clear what percentage of the company that Naspers is seeking to acquire, although it would be a minority investment that values the Carousell business at over $500 million. The deal could be a first step towards Naspers acquiring a controlling interest in the business further down the line, one source said.

Carousell declined to respond when asked for comment.

“It is our company’s policy to neither acknowledge nor deny our involvement in any merger, acquisition or divestiture activity, nor to comment on market rumors,” Naspers told TechCrunch in a statement.

Timing of the discussions is notable since Carousell announced a $85 million investment round in May. (TechCrunch broke news of the round the previous October.) That deal — the startup’s Series C — took it to $126 million from investors to date and added big names to the Carousell cap table. EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and Singapore’s DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, took part in the Series C, which also included existing backers Rakuten Ventures, the VC linked to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia India and 500 Startups.

Earlier this month, Carousell CEO and co-founder Siu Rui Quek told Bloomberg that the company had turned down acquisition offers in the past.

Carousell is highly-regarded in Singapore for being one of the first home-grown startups to show promise — its three founding members each graduated the National University of Singapore, NUS.

Aside from raising significant investor capital, it has scaled regionally it is battle against larger and better-funded e-commerce rivals Alibaba -owned Lazada and Shopee, a business from NYSE-listed Sea. In May, Quek told TechCrunch that Carousell has helped sell over 50 million items between users and it currently has over 144 million listings.

Naspers, meanwhile, has upped its focus on Southeast Asia in recent times, although its sole deal is a $5 million investment in crypto startup Coins.ph.

The firm remains best known for its Tencent deal, which is legendary in investment circles. Back in 2001, it bought 46.5 percent of Tencent for $32 million. Over time that was diluted to 33 percent, but it grew significantly in size as Tencent’s business took off, going on to become Asia’s first $500 billion company last November. Naspers resisted the urge to sell until March 2018 when it parted with two percent of the firm in exchange for around $9.8 billion.

Another of Nasper’s big wins this year was Flipkart’s sale to Walmart which earned it $2.2 billion in returns.

 WeChat, the Uber popular Chinese message app with more than 500 million active users, is taking a leaf out of the Skype playbook after it launched an international telephone calling service. Read More

 NextEv, a Chinese electric car company potentially taking on Tesla and Faraday Future, has tapped Padmasree Warrior for the U.S. CEO position. Warrior will also head up software development and the user experience globally for the Shanghai-based company. According to Warrior, NextEv has already pulled in half a billion dollars of the $1 billion it plans to raise from the likes of Sequoia… Read More