American private equity firm TPG will invest $600 million in Jio Platforms, joining a roster of high-profile investors including Facebook and Silver Lake that have backed India’s top telecom operator at the height of a global pandemic.
TPG said it is acquiring a 0.93% stake in Jio Platforms, giving the Indian firm a valuation of $65 billion. TPG, which manages $79 billion of assets, is the eighth investor that has agreed to back Mukesh Ambani’s telecom network in just as many weeks.
Reliance Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 388 million subscribers, has secured $13.49 billion by selling nearly 22% stake in the company in the past two and a half months.
TPG, which is also an investor in Uber, Spotify and Airbnb, said it is impressed by what the three-and-a-half-year-old subsidiary of India’s most valued firm (Reliance Industries) has achieved in the country. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, shared a similar complement for TPG’s track record.
Jim Coulter, co-chief executive of TPG said, the company is “excited to play an early role in Jio’s journey as they continue to transform and advance India’s digital economy. Jio is a disruptive industry leader that is empowering small businesses and consumers across India by providing them with critical, high-quality digital services. The company is bringing unmatched potential and execution capabilities to the market, setting the tone for all technology companies to come.”
Saturday’s announcement further captures the growing appeal of Jio Platforms to foreign investors looking for a slice of the world’s second-largest internet market. Jio, which launched its commercial operations in the second half of 2016, upended the telecommunications market in India by offering mobile data and voice calls at cut-rate prices.
Pankaj Jain, a high-profile angel investor, told TechCrunch that Jio Platforms’ digital services suite has helped it attract foreign investors. Jio Platforms owns a bevy of digital apps and services including music streaming service JioSaavn (which it says it will take public), on-demand live television service JioTV and payments app JioMoney, as well as smartphones, and broadband business.
“Foreign investors see that owning the pipes is a race to the bottom in terms of ARPU (average revenue per user) but having so many bundled services seems like it’s the future for telecommunications companies. By solidifying their content strategy, they have appealed to investors that are seeing this same strategy play out in other markets,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s still to be seen whether content can help increase margins significantly in India.”
One of the world’s best selling wearable lineups just added a new gadget to the mix.
Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi today unveiled the Mi Smart Band 5 that delivers several improvements and adds features such as a bigger screen, new wireless charging system, and women’s health mode over the company’s one-year-old Mi Smart Band 4 — while retaining its dirt-cheap price point.
The Mi Smart Band 5 features a 1.1-inch AMOLED display that is 20% larger than the one its immediate predecessor sported.
With the new band, the world’s second largest wearable vendor is also bringing a range of new animated watch faces including characters from TV series such as Spongebob Squarepants, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Detective Conan, and eight colorful straps.
Xiaomi says the new smart band is powered by an improved processor — the name of which it did not specify — to enable tracking of menstrual cycles for the first time, and support additional features such as stress assessment that will tell the wearer when it’s a good time to relax.
The Mi Smart Band 5, compatible with iPhones as well as Android handsets, also monitors the wearer’s sleep cycle more efficiently now, adding support for REM sleep as well as evaluating deep and light sleep sessions. The company claimed its heart rate monitoring is now 50% more precise.
One of the biggest improvements in the new band is its new charging system. This is a refreshing change as previous models in Xiaomi’s Mi Smart Band lineup have received complaints from users who described having to get the tracker out of the strap as a clumsy process. Now the company says its new magnetic charging dock automatically snaps onto the bottom of the band. Charging the band once delivers up to 14-days of continuous usage.
Like the Mi Smart Band 4, the Band 5 supports company’s homegrown digital voice assistant XiaoAI that a user can trigger by swiping to the right of the display.
There is an additional variant of the Smart Band 5 that supports NFC. This model features support for mobile payment services, and can be used to unlock smart doors and also serve as a transportation card at select subways.
The Mi Smart Band 5 goes on sale in China next week at a price point of RMB 189 ($26.75) while the NFC variant of the band is priced at RMB 229 ($32.5). The company says the device will be made available in international markets “soon.”
Xiaomi continues to be one of the leading players in the wearable market as it aggressively refreshes and introduces new devices. In November last year, Xiaomi its first smartwatch — called the Mi Watch — that looks strikingly similar to the Apple Watch. The Mi Watch is priced at $185.
According to research firm IDC, the company shipped 10.1 million wearable devices in the quarter that ended in March this year. It is ahead of Samsung, Huawei, and Fitbit. Apple maintains its top spot in the category.
Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps — Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. Neither app is searchable within Apple’s Chinese App Store at the time of writing.
Pocket Casts, which was acquired by a group of American public radio companies in 2018, tweeted that it “has been removed from the Chinese App Store by Apple, at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China,” the country’s internet watchdog.
When Pocket Casts asked for clarification, Apple’s app review team told the podcast firm to contact the CAC directly, an email seen by TechCrunch showed.
“We will most likely contact them to find out more, though we weren’t given that option to stop the app from being removed, only as a potential solution to have it re-instated. The very small amount of warning we were given between there being a problem, and our app being completely removed from the Chinese app store was quite alarming,” a spokesperson for Pocket Casts told TechCrunch.
“We assumed that what they’d want us to remove are specific podcasts, and possible some of the Black Lives Matter content we’d posted.”
Castro Podcasts, bought by Dribbble owner Tiny in 2018, said in a tweet that while it wasn’t given specifics about its removal in China, the incident might have been caused by its “support of the protests.”
We think it might have been our support of the protests in the Discover tab. We were not given specifics.
The losses are reminiscent of Apple’s crackdown on Chinese-language podcasts last year around this time. For many independent podcast creators in China, that was the beginning of the end to free expression. While domestic podcast platforms play by Beijing’s rules to self-censor, cracks have long remained on international platforms such as Apple Podcast.
The Apple app, which functions as RSS feeds rather than a hosting service, has unnerved the authority for its relatively hands-off approach towards audio content. That’s a contrast to its Chinese counterparts, which screen content thoroughly before publishing. While Apple only distributes content, its Chinese rivals “combine content hosting, content distribution, and user listening as a result of China’s regulations and years of commercial development,” observed (in Chinese) Chinese podcasting firm JustPod in a blog post.
Most foreign podcasts had long been inaccessible on Apple within China. When the giant began weeding out Chinese shows that lacked government-approved hosting partners that moderated content, many saw it as Apple’s nod to censorship masked as a law-abiding move.
The company’s shareholders have protested, with 40% of the group (paywalled) casting support for a proposal that would require Apple to be more transparent on how it responds to government demands for censorship.
Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts are two censorship-free alternatives that many Chinese podcast creators had picked since last year’s purge within Apple Podcast. Pocket Casts said China is now its 7th largest market with rapid growth. These options are now gone.
Recent events suggest that Apple may be increasingly caving to Beijing’s pressure to stay in the market. In February, the firm removed the smash-hit Plague Inc., which was told it included “content that is illegal in China as determined by the CAC,” the same government agency that dropped Pocket Casts. In 2017, Apple stirred up a huge controversy when it pulled hundreds of VPNs that would help mainland users access otherwise blocked websites.
Uber has appointed Pradeep Parameswaran, who oversaw the ride-hailing giant’s business in India and South Asia for two years, as the regional general manager of its Asia Pacific region operations.
Parameswaran, who starts his new role next week, will be tasked to improve Uber’s presence in nine nations in the Asia Pacific region where the company currently operates.
“There is huge potential to serve more Uber customers and continue innovating across the diverse region, whether that be taxi partnerships in North Asia, new products like Uber Rent in Australia or pushing two and three-wheelers deep into the Indian heartland,” said Parameswaran, pictured above, in a statement.
Asia Pacific countries indeed offer a huge opportunity to Uber, which in recent years has retreated from Southeast Asia and China as the heavily backed, loss-making company struggled to compete with just as heavily backed and loss-making local startups.
Earlier this year, before the coronavirus began to spread widely outside of China, Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said the firm planned to expand in Japan and South Korea in the immediate future.
During his tenure as the chief of Uber India and South Asia, Parameswaran helped the firm grow and steer through some tough decisions. Uber said earlier this year that in 2019, it handled 14 million rides each week in India.
But the company’s bet to win the food delivery market did not work in the country, despite spending millions each month to lure customers. Earlier this year, Uber sold Eats’ Indian business to local rival Zomato.
Parameswaran will be overseeing Uber’s ride business in Asia Pacific region, and not the food delivery category, a spokesperson said, adding that the firm is running a selection process to determine a replacement for Parameswaran’s former India role.
He will also be moving to company’s yet-to-be named new headquarter in APAC. Uber hired and appointed Amit Jain as its India head and later promoted him to run the Asia Pacific business. But Jain left the company last year to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. Since then, the region has been managed by Uber team based in Europe.
“We’re pleased that Pradeep Parameswaran will take on an expanded role as Regional General Manager for APAC. After capably leading our India and South Asia business since 2018, I know that he will continue to inspire Uber’s next phase of growth across this key region,” said Andrew Macdonald, SVP of Mobility and Business Operations at Uber, in a statement.
Five-month-old Indonesian startup Ula that aims to help small retailers solve inefficiencies that they face in supply chain, inventory, and working capital, said today it has raised $10.5 million in a new financing round to grow its business in the Southeast Asian market.
The Jakarta-headquartered startup, which was launched in January this year, operates a wholesale e-commerce marketplace to help store owners stock only the inventory they need, and also grants them with working capital.
Ula today operates in Indonesia, where like other Asian markets, traditional retail still accounts for the vast majority of retail sales in the country. These shop owners, several run by families, know how to run their businesses in a cost efficient manner. But they struggle with accessing working capital and sourcing inventories.
“A grocery store might need to source inventory from up to 50 different sources (wholesalers/ distributors) every week and sometimes order in bulk to get better rates, even when they don’t need such large quantities,” said Derry Sakti, co-founder of Ula.
Ula, which is currently in private beta, uses data science to grant working capital credit to retailers, it said.
Abheek Anand, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital, said as more small and medium sized enterprises in Indonesia begin to adopt technology, platforms such as Ula could help them streamline their businesses.
“Ula has a highly experienced team bringing together the right mix of experience in local and global e-commerce, retail and fintech markets and we are excited to be early partners in this journey,” he said.
Without disclosing exact figures, Ula said its business has grown 10 times since launch with several customers returning to buy significantly more. Stores have purchased more in May amid the global pandemic than they did earlier this year, the startup claimed.
The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand across Indonesia over the next year and service inventory in more categories including apparel and electronics.
“For us, the true measure of Ula’s success will be in how much we can improve our customers’ lives and businesses. Our collective vision is to revolutionize SMB trade using technology, helping increase their efficiency and providing them with tools to conduct their business seamlessly and more profitably” said Riky Tenggara, co-founder of Ula.
Tenggara was part of the early team at e-commerce giant Lazada, while Sakti oversaw consumer goods giant P&G’s operations in Indonesia. Ula’s other co-founders are Nipun Mehra, who helped build businesses and categories at Amazon and Flipkart and was part of the leadership team at the Indian payments firm Pine Labs; and Alan Wong, who helped build distributed systems in supply chain, catalog and search at Amazon.
For years, Chinese e-commerce exporters have been learning the ins and outs of ad placement on Facebook, Instagram and other mainstream social media platforms to reach customers around the world. But they recently spotted a new way to grab people’s attention, one that has never felt more familiar.
Video influencers.
Shopping via videos is currently all the rage in China. There are efforts from short video apps like Douyin — TikTok’s Chinese sister — that match merchants with content creators for promotion. During the coronavirus lockdown, millions of consumers relied on live videos to check out products and posed questions to merchants remotely, a practice that has won endorsement from local governments as a way to drum up domestic consumption. In just Q1 this year, more than 4 million live shopping sessions took place in China.
In other parts of the world, brands and video creators — especially influencers with sizable followings — are also getting pally. A few American venture capitalists have recognized the early potential of the collaboration. Amazon, a few years behind its Chinese counterparts in live streaming, launched Amazon Live last year.
Now Alibaba, one of the pioneers of shoppable videos in China, has big plans to attract and train up international influencers — so it can sell more around the world through AliExpress . The platform is one of Alibaba’s marketplaces for international consumers, which altogether claim 180 million annual active consumers.
“Chinese manufacturers are always looking for ways to sell and influencers are the quickest way to drive traffic these days,” reckoned Miranda Tan, chief executive of Robin8, a data-driven influencer marketing platform.
Indeed, a few Shenzhen-based e-commerce exporters told TechCrunch that they are actively looking to work with international content creators, particularly TikTok influencers, to market their products. For now, they depend on their Chinese staff to make low-budget promo videos that often miss important cultural nuances.
Everyone is a seller
AliExpress plans to recruit as many as 100,000 “promoters,” who will help merchants and brands on AliExpress promote through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other popular internet platforms. Besides popular influencers, the platform is also after talented content creators behind the camera and seasoned marketers with access to customer acquisition channels.
Screenshot: a live broadcasted promotion on AliExpress
“Live shopping is still in its relative infancy in the overseas consumer market,” Martin Wang, who heads overseas seller operation and social commerce cooperation at AliExpress, told TechCrunch. “Our initiative will help propel the overseas ecosystem forward.”
To that end, the team created the “Connect” matchmaking system for influencers to find promotional tasks and is providing training and analytics tools to support their creative process. While live selling has been available to Alibaba sellers in China since 2016, AliExpress only added the feature last year and announced the recruitment program in April.
The call for talent came at a time when millions around the world have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus outbreak. It’s no surprise that AliExpress is billing the recruitment as one that could “help individuals rebuild after COVID-19.”
“A lot of people don’t have money now and are looking for ways to make money during the coronavirus outbreak,” contended Tan, who has observed many individuals are learning to be product promoters on social media to make extra bucks. “Everyone becomes their own independent company.”
Cultural differences
An obvious target for AliExpress is the emerging crop of bilingual foreign influencers living in China. “Many are foreign students in China with a positive image and a knack for expression. They have a flexible schedule in the evening, so agencies will approach them, train them as live streaming hosts and eventually sign with them,” said Wang.
The influencers fluent in Chinese and their native language may seem like ideal ambassadors in sellers’ target markets, but there is a potential drawback. “They might look to Li Jiaqi and Weiya as role models,” said Wang, referring to China’s top beauty influencers known for their record-smashing sales. “But what works in China may not work in their home countries.”
On the demand side, Wang worried that Chinese merchants are too accustomed to seeing meteoric sales numbers that influencers in China generate. “The overseas [live streaming] market has not reached the stage of maturity, so it’s our priority to manage expectations from both sides [of sellers and content creators.]”
Most of AliExpress’s sellers naturally come from China, the world’s factory, while Russia is its biggest market for revenue. The platform has been working to boost its inventory by opening up to sellers in Turkey, Russia, Spain and Italy last year. For instance, Russia is a big market for AliExpress’s Turkish merchants. The expansion means an even greater challenge for the Chinese company to cope with differences in business dynamics and consumer behavior across regions.
Fleets aren’t private stories, but it’s Twitter way to let users share things that are less accessible to the world. As my colleague Sarah Perez described recently, anyone can visit someone’s public Twitter profile and tap to view their Fleets, that like Stories on other platforms, sit atop at the top of the screen. But Fleet won’t circulate on Twitter’s network, show up in Search or Moments, and it can’t be embedded on a third-party website.
“We’re testing a way for you to think out loud without the Likes, Retweets, or replies, called Fleets! Best part? They disappear after 24 hours,” Twitter India said in a tweet.
Namaste! Starting today, Fleets are coming to India. If you’re in India, check it out and let us know what you think! #FleetsFeedback
India, the world’s second largest internet market, is a key overseas nation for several American technology companies. Twitter had about 55 million monthly active users in India in the month of April, according to mobile insight firm App Annie and shared by an industry executive.
WhatsApp has resolved an issue that caused phone numbers of some of its users to appear in Google search results.
The fix comes days after a researcher revealed that the phone number of WhatsApp users who created a simplified link to allow others to chat with them or join a group appeared in search results.
In a statement, a WhatsApp spokesperson said that this feature, called Click to Chat, is designed to help users, especially small and microbusinesses around the world connect with their customers.
“While we appreciate this researcher’s report and value the time that he took to share it with us, it did not qualify for a bounty since it merely contained a search engine index of URLs that WhatsApp users chose to make public. All WhatsApp users, including businesses, can block unwanted messages with the tap of a button,” the spokesperson added.
The Click to Chat feature allows users to create a short URL — wa.me/<phoneNumber> — that they can share with their friends or customers to facilitate quick conversation without having to first save their phone number to their contacts list.
India-based researcher Athul Jayaram, who revealed this issue, called it a privacy lapse. He claimed that as many as 300,000 phone numbers appeared in Google search results if someone looked up for “site:wa.me”.
Jayaram said the phone numbers appeared in search results because WhatsApp did not direct Google and other search engines to ignore indexing these links — a feature that search engines provide to any web administrator.
He confirmed on Tuesday that WhatsApp had made some change to inform web crawlers to not index certain links.
But Jayaram isn’t the first person to report that WhatsApp phone numbers were visible in Google search results. WaBetaInfo, a website that tracks changes in WhatsApp, reported this behaviour in February this year.
And as Jayaram points out, many WhatsApp users he contacted whose numbers appeared in Google search results were surprised to learn that this sensitive information was accessible on the public internet.
Alarm has been rising in Washington over the extent of Chinese influence in the U.S., with particular focus on universities and their research as well as on concerns around China’s acquisition of critical U.S. technologies that it needs in sectors as diverse as semiconductors and aeronautics.
Now, a new bipartisan investigatory report from the Senate urges even further action, this time in monitoring and potentially outright blocking Chinese telecommunications companies from accessing the American market.
Released this morning by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report makes a range of recommendations, including pushing the Trump administration to take a more active role in monitoring Chinese telecom companies like China Unicom and ComNet and also pushing Congress to put more resources and legal heft behind regulations designed to monitor the national security implications of these companies.
At the heart of the investigation, which has gone on for more than a year, is the work of Team Telecom, what we have called here at TechCrunch a “shadowy” informal committee between the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense that works in conjunction with the FCC to review national security issues within the FCC’s work.
The Senate’s report notes that executive order, but says it does not go far enough, demanding that the rules be expanded to continually monitor companies receiving licenses. At this time, “Team Telecom” or what is now known as the “Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector” (I’ve dubbed it CAFPUSTSS but that is really hard to type) only reviews applications once at the time of submission and never follows up. From the report:
Team Telecom entered into a security agreement with China Telecom Americas in 2007 and ComNet in 2009. Since entering into the agreements more than ten years ago, Team Telecom conducted only two site visits to each company—or four in total. Only one of those visits occurred before 2017.
In its recommendations, the Senate’s report pushes for continual monitoring of foreign telecom operators so that any changes in its operations would be caught by U.S. investigators.
In addition to expanding the statutory authority of Team Telecom’s new committee, the report also urges more resources be appropriated to fund its work. The report castigated the paltry resources currently assigned to these investigations, noting that “[the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security] historically dedicated fewer than five employees to reviewing applications and monitoring compliance with security agreements.“
This most recent report is part of a long line of studies made by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on China, including investigating the country’s Confucius Institutes at American universities, talent recruitment plans such as China’s Thousand Talents Plan, and Chinese cyberattacks on American infrastructure.
Beijing Eswin Computing Technology, a Chinese startup that supplies semiconductor design and solution provider, has raised $283 million in a new financing round at a time when the world’s most populous nation is looking to cut its reliance on the U.S. and UK for chipsets.
The four-year-old firm said the new round, Series B, was led by Legend Capital, the investment arm of computer vendor Lenovo, and IDG Capital. Riverhead Capital Investment Management, Lighthouse Capital, and state-backed Haining City and Zhejiang Province participated in the round.
Eswin Computing develops integrated chips and solutions focused on displays and videos, AI data processing and wireless connection. It also offers advanced packaging and testing solutions. The firm is led by Wang Dongsheng, who previously served as the chairman of BOE Technology Group, a Chinese giant that produces displays for TVs and smartphones and counts Huawei among its customers.
BOE maintains a business relationship with Eswin, according to Chinese news outlet Caixin. BOE holds 37.35% of chip-related business in Eswin, the publication said.
In a press statement, Eswin said it will spend the fresh capital on research and development, manufacturing, and recruitment. That, it believes, will help spur the domestic chip production in China, which today relies heavily on U.S. and UK firms. Last year, the U.S. blacklisted Huawei over security concerns and trade disputes with China.
