Alibaba - Interconnected

Is the Next Alibaba...AliCloud?

During Alibaba’s Q4 2023 earnings call, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group’s CEO, expressed a rather romantic optimism that “we would love…to see one of these little Alibaba's spinning off from Alibaba becoming another big Alibaba.” Among the six “little Alibaba’s” that

Topics: Alibaba•

Alibaba Reorg

If you work in tech long enough, you will experience many company reorgs. They are almost as routine as sales kickoffs or quarterly earnings calls. But every once in a while, a consequential company does a reorg so major and out of the box

Topics: Alibaba• Jack Ma•

Alibaba: Is It a “Mature” Company?

I still vividly remember the last time I visited Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou. It was the summer of 2016. I was in town for the G20 Summit and happened to have another unrelated meeting with one of Alibaba’s original co-founders, who functioned

Topics: Masa Son• Softbank• Alibaba•

Understanding Masa Son’s Rationality

During Christmas last year, I read one of the few biographies available on Masayoshi Son, titled “Aiming High [https://www.amazon.com/Aiming-High-Masayoshi-SoftBank-Disrupting/dp/1529338581/ref=asc_df_1529338581/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=564725475526&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=290157570257548952&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=

Topics: XPeng• Tesla• Alibaba•

Why China’s Road to Self-Driving Goes Through Inner Mongolia

AliCloud and XPeng announced a partnership to build a dedicated cloud computing center to train XPeng electric vehicles’ self-driving capabilities last week. The news of this alliance was not terribly surprising. After all, Alibaba was an early investor in XPeng, still one of its

Topics: China• Alibaba• Jack Ma•

Ant IPO and China's "Startup Debt" Problem

Last week, Chinese tech stocks went through a mini rollercoaster. The Wall Street Journal first reported that regulators were close to completing their cybersecurity investigations [https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-conclude-didi-cybersecurity-probe-lift-ban-on-new-users-11654501320?mod=hp_lead_pos6] of Didi, Full Trust Alliance, and Kanzhun, sending stock

Topics: Alibaba• Charlie Munger• Open Source•

[Premium] Charlie Munger’s New Favorite: Alibaba

Topics: Open Source• China• Alibaba•

Open Source in China: Next Four Years

Last May, I wrote a three-part series that surveyed the entire open source landscape in China: * Part I: the Players [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-players/] * Part II: the Game [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-game/] * Part III: the Trends [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-trends/] Since then, the landscape

Topics: Alibaba• Cloud Industry• Open Source•

May 16, 2021: AliCloud, JEDI, HarmonyOS, Hillhouse Capital, Tencent Cloud

Hello Interconnected Readers: I have not written a bilingual news source summary and commentary in a while -- my apologies. Interconnected, as a newsletter and product, will be going through some changes, which we will announce later this week. I’m also going through

Topics: Meta• Alibaba• LATAM•

Two Week Break; No New Post

Dear Interconnected Subscribers and Readers: We are going on a two-week break (first break since starting this newsletter more than a year ago), because I am working on a few personal and professional transitions, moving to a different city (Seattle), and planning some new

Topics: 5G• Open Source• Antitrust•

April 11, 2021: OpenRAN, Google vs Oracle, Mexican Unicorn, Alibaba Antitrust Fine

Hello Interconnected Readers: This weekly issue has a little bit of everything: possible US investment into OpenRAN, the monumental Google vs Oracle Supreme Court decision, Kavak the Mexican Unicorn getting bigger, Alibaba’s antitrust fine, Chinese engineers fleeing tech to work in civil service,

Topics: Alibaba• Tencent• Antitrust•

January 24, 2021: AliPay & WeChat Pay Breaking Up? AWS forks Elasticsearch

Hello Interconnected Readers: After arriving in Mexico City earlier this week, the four-hour time difference between Mexico and Hawaii is giving me a surprisingly bad jet lag, so I will spare you my usual personal letter. Let’s go straight to the news and

Topics: Antitrust• Alibaba• Google•

Google, Alibaba, Global Antitrust Standard

People love a “missing billionaire” story, even when there isn’t one. That’s what many Western media outlets and some “Substack experts” have been hotly discussing lately: “Where is Jack Ma?” As Alibaba’s stock price gyrates, all this reminds me of was

Topics: Alibaba• Antitrust• Top Articles•

Alibaba and Antitrust with Chinese Characteristics

I had planned to take time off during this Christmas week and enjoy the rustic island of Moloka‘i. But the announcement of an antitrust probe on Alibaba, dropped on Christmas Eve (and consequently dropped Alibaba’s stock price by 13%), is too interesting

Topics: Facebook• Alibaba• Huawei•

November 29, 2020: P(Good for the World)

Hello Interconnected Readers: Last week -- American Thanksgiving plus my birthday week -- I re-read a few books. One of them was “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.” One small part of the book talks about Kenneth Arrow [https://en.wikipedia.org/

Topics: Antitrust• Alibaba• Jack Ma•

November 15, 2020: 16 Days

Hello Interconnected Readers: I had a busy week last week that was mostly self-created. While still doing volunteer work at the Reno campaign office (work doesn’t stop when Election Day is over) and continuing my day job as an investor (doing calls with

Topics: Alibaba• Jack Ma• Regulation•

Jack Ma, P2P Lending, Responsibility, Legacy

When I was in my 20s, I dreamed of becoming a presidential speech writer. I’d stay up reading books, like Ted Sorensen’s memoir “Counselor [https://www.amazon.com/COUNSELOR-Life-at-Edge-History/dp/0060798718/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3D8HHRP3NCZ3O&dchild=1&keywords=counselor+ted+

Topics: Jack Ma• Alibaba• IPO•

Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

Below is my unofficial translation of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai based on a Chinese transcript [https://sfl.global/news_post/mayunshanghaiwaitanjinrongluntanyanjiangquanwenwushanjian/] , with minor edits for clarity and speechification. To read some of my deep

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• Tencent•

China's Cloud Ceiling

Cloud computing is hot. All cloud stocks are hot. Cloud was already growing everywhere and now accelerated by COVID, with massive adoption trends like remote work, e-commerce, digital health, and who knows what else. What used to be an outlandish approach to enterprise IT

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• Tencent•

Where Can the Chinese Internet Go?

With all the executive orders, CFIUS edicts, and additional sanctions placed on Chinese tech companies by the US, it’s hard to see where these companies - and by extension the Chinese Internet - can expand to. Certainly, China’s own economy will continue

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• IBM•

Alibaba vs IBM: Fighting for Third Place in Cloud

Competition in the cloud industry is heating up. On China’s Monday, Alibaba announced a $28.2 billion USD (200 billion RMB) investment [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion-in-cloud-as-it-battles-amazon-microsoft.html] in Alibaba Cloud over the next three years. On America’s Monday,

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• AWS•

Stress Test the Cloud: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP

I’ve been writing a lot about the public cloud industry lately. In my previous two posts, I touched on Alibaba Cloud’s earnings vis-a-vis [https://interconnected.blog/alibaba-cloud-the-ignored-cloud/] Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s GCP to assess their relative size, and a fairly

Topics: Cloud Industry• AWS• Azure•

Where Are The Data Centers: AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Azure, GCP

Earlier this week, I wrote about [https://interconnected.blog/alibaba-cloud-the-ignored-cloud/] whether Alibaba Cloud should be ignored in the larger cloud computing industry conversation, when its growth and earnings are comparable to that of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A public cloud is an extraordinarily complex,

Topics: Alibaba• Cloud Industry• Azure•

Alibaba Cloud: The Ignored Cloud

In the cloud computing industry, the companies that get mentioned the most are the so-called “big three”: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Alibaba Cloud is usually ignored in the cloud chatter in mainstream U.S. business media,