China

Every Chinese tech company wants to make EVs

The market is red-hot and everyone thinks they know how to crack it.

Every Chinese tech company wants to make EVs

Visitors walk past a BYD Co. electric vehicle at the carmaker's booth at the Auto Shanghai 2021 show.

Photo: Oilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Chinese tech companies have never been afraid of leaping into areas outside their core businesses. But the next jump they're making is risky, even for big firms: a shift to making electric vehicles.

China's EV market has become piping hot, with a parade of internet behemoths foraying into the car manufacturing business over the past six months. In a policy paper published last November by the State Council, China's cabinet, Beijing spelled out its plan to reach 20% penetration of new energy vehicles by 2025. By 2035, the government envisions EVs will become the dominant new vehicles sold in the country.

As Beijing makes a heavy push to produce more energy-saving vehicles, tech companies, ranging from the old moneyed giants like Baidu and Alibaba to smartphone makers like Huawei and Xiaomi, have been stepping up efforts to gain a foothold in the world's largest EV market.

China added 30,000 new energy vehicle-related companies in the first quarter of 2021, a 298% increase from the same period last year, according to data from Tianyancha, a comprehensive database on Chinese firms. In this fast-evolving EV sector, internet companies are up against not only traditional and established automakers, but also upstarts in the autonomous driving sector, such as NIO and Xpeng Motors.

Here's a list of Chinese tech companies that have in recent months announced plans to make EVs:

Alibaba

The ecommerce giant was the first among China's tech giants to get its hands dirty in the EV maker space. In December 2020, Alibaba set up a three-way EV joint venture with China's biggest carmaker SAIC Motor, a state-owned company, and Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park Development, an investment arm of the Shanghai municipal government. In January, the joint venture launched its first car model, a sedan, under the brand "IM."

Apart from its latest EV push, Alibaba has been developing driverless driving technology. In 2018, Alibaba set up an autonomous driving lab under its global research arm Damo Academy. The tech giant is also a major backer of the domestic EV startup Xpeng Motors.

Baidu

Search engine giant Baidu in January established a joint venture with China's largest private automaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group to make smart electric vehicles.

Baidu, which has been transitioning into an AI powerhouse, has been investing in autonomous driving technology since 2013. In 2017, Baidu launched Apollo, a self-driving platform. Apollo launched driverless car-hailing services on May 2. The Apollo project is separate from Baidu's joint venture with Geely. But Apollo's smart driving capabilities will be applied in manufacturing the first Baidu-Geely car model.

Xiaomi

On March 31, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced the smartphone maker would set up an EV subsidiary, and said the company would invest $10 billion over the next decade in the smart EV business.

Didi

Didi Chuxing, China's car-hailing unicorn, perhaps is the closest to the EV business among the tech companies that have recently moved to make cars.

In 2019, Didi Chuxing formed a joint venture with the domestic automaker BYD to make EVs designed for ride-hailing services. BYD is the controlling shareholder of the venture.

On April 18, Didi Chuxing announced a partnership with Volvo to develop self-driving cars for a planned future self-driving taxi fleet.

In a separate attempt to step up its EV making efforts, Didi is also building an EV subsidiary, for which it's actively poaching talents from automakers, according to the Chinese financial publication LatePost.

Huawei

On April 19, Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment maker (and one battered by U.S. sanctions), signaled its pursuit of the EV market by unveiling an electric car with the HarmonyOS operating system, the Huawei-built OS powering its phones. The vehicle, Arcfox Alpha S, was co-developed by Huawei's driverless car solutions arm and a subsidiary of the state-owned carmaker BAIC Group. Reuters reported in late April that Huawei is also considering taking control of a domestic automaker's EV unit.

360

360, China's largest producer of cybersecurity products, announced on April 26 that it had led a $465.8 million series D round of funding into the EV startup Hozon Auto, which owns the brand Nezha. This move would make 360 the second largest shareholder of the startup. According to the Chinese publication Jiemian, it only took 360 three months to research the market and decide to enter the EV business.

OPPO

OPPO, China's second-biggest smartphone maker by shipments, became the latest internet company to make its foray into the EV market. The company confirmed to Beijing Business News on April 28 that it is investing in the EV business, becoming the third Chinese phone maker to tap into China's burgeoning EV market. Chinese tech publication 36Kr had reported earlier that OPPO's founder Tony Chen was researching the EV market, and other executives were interviewing to fill positions in a new self-driving team.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Xiaomi announced its EV subsidiary on March 30; it was announced March 31. This story was updated on May 10, 2021.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins