2 h. ago Shein hit with US$175 million fine by French watchdog over cookies

Online fast-fashion retailer Shein received a €150 million (US$175 million) fine on Wednesday from France’s data protection authority over the improper use of cookies, a decision the company contested and said it would appeal. The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), a government body charged with enforcing consumer data protection, said Shein’s website failed to comply with regulations in collecting consumers’ data without consent. When users browsing Shein’s French...

Economics

3 h. ago Trump’s sons’ American Bitcoin stake worth US$1.5 billion in stock debut

A bitcoin company tied to US President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons more than doubled in value in its stock market debut on Wednesday, valuing the sons’ stake at well over US$1.5 billion as the first family grows their crypto business interests. Shares in American Bitcoin, a bitcoin miner, soared as high as US$14.52 on its first day of trade on the Nasdaq, before pulling back to be up 16.5 per cent at US$8.04 by the end of the day. The company was around 20 per cent owned by Eric Trump and...

Politics

5 h. ago China Future Tech webinar | How US tactics could boost China’s chip self

Date and time: Friday, September 19, 2025 10.30am-11.30am (HKT) The webinar will be live streamed on this page on Friday, September 19. Bookmark this page or add it to your calendar to stay informed. Submit your questions to the panel and get them answered during the webinar. Questions from SCMP Plus readers will be prioritised. Upgrade your standard SCMP subscription or start your free trial to enjoy the priority. The US-China chip war is escalating, with Washington’s goal of limiting Beijing’s...

Politics

6 h. ago China advances in AI agentic tools as Tencent, ByteDance weigh in

China is making progress in artificial intelligence “agentic frameworks”, the tools required to make AI agents, as the country’s tech giants begin to take on US players such as AutoGen and OpenAI Swarm. Tencent Holdings was the latest to join the fray after the Shenzhen-based company open-sourced its new Youtu-Agent agentic framework on Tuesday. Developed by Youtu Labs, Tencent’s AI research department, the framework was released on Microsoft’s open-source code-hosting platform GitHub last...

Politics

17 h. ago Beijing’s Victory Day parade, China’s film industry: SCMP daily highlights

Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China’s military parade, as it happened: new weapons debut in show of deterrence China held a massive military parade along Changan Avenue in central Beijing, showcasing the country’s latest and most advanced weapons to commemorate the 80th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan in World War II. 2. The 5 key takeaways from China’s Victory Day military...

Politics

18 h. ago China debut of thinner iPhone 17 likely to face hurdles amid smartphone eSim uncertainty

The world’s thinnest iPhone may face a delayed arrival in one of Apple’s most critical markets, as the embedded-Sim infrastructure is not ready for a nationwide roll-out in time for the iPhone 17 launch this month. Shop assistants at two Apple authorised resellers in Foshan, in southern Guangdong province, said they have not received any training regarding the eSim support. In comparison, employees at resellers in the European Union were asked to complete a relevant course by Friday, MacRumors...

Politics

29 h. ago Apple loses lead robotics AI researcher to Meta in ongoing exodus

Apple’s lead artificial intelligence researcher for robotics has departed the company to join Meta Platforms’ competing effort, part of an exodus of AI talent from the iPhone maker. The employee, Zhang Jian, joined the Meta Robotics Studio, the social media company confirmed on Tuesday. Separately, three more AI researchers are leaving Apple’s in-house large language models team, adding to the upheaval in that group, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The latest string of...

Technology

42 h. ago Ant Group acquires stake in Chinese memory chip firm InnoStar

A subsidiary of Ant Group has acquired a minority stake in memory chip developer InnoStar Semiconductor, signalling continued Chinese efforts to support domestic suppliers and reduce reliance on imported semiconductors. Shanghai Yunya Enterprise Management Consulting, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ant Group, recently snapped up a 1.87 per cent shareholding in InnoStar for an undisclosed amount, according to registry records in late August from corporate information provider Aiqicha. InnoStar had...

Politics

44 h. ago Chinese delivery giant 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. Beijing-based Meituan, the long-standing leader of China’s food delivery market, on Monday 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...

Politics

66 h. ago Chip designer Cambricon stays in the spotlight amid market potential

Shares of Cambricon Technologies on Monday closed lower on the Shanghai Stock Exchange after a representative of Alibaba Group Holding denied speculation that it had ordered 150,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from the Beijing-based AI chip designer. According to the representative, the platform of Alibaba Cloud – the artificial intelligence and cloud computing services unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba – was powered by multiple Chinese-designed GPUs. Alibaba owns the South China Morning...

Politics

68 h. ago SMIC to take full control of chip foundry as China’s fab industry consolidates

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China’s largest contract chipmaker, said it planned to buy all of a foundry it controls as the nation’s fab industry undergoes a wave of consolidation. In a statement last week, the company said it planned to buy the remaining equity interest in Semiconductor Manufacturing North China (Beijing) Corporation (SMNC), a subsidiary that is currently 51 per cent owned by SMIC. The chipmaker said it would buy the stake from state-owned...

Politics

2 d. ago Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech gets US$1 billion funding boost

UBTech Robotics, a leading Chinese manufacturer of factory robots, has secured a credit line of up to US$1 billion from a Hong Kong investment firm to finance its production expansion, including a joint venture in the Middle East. The Hong Kong-listed company said in an exchange filing on Sunday it would receive funding from Infini Capital, an investment conglomerate headquartered in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi. The support would come through share allocations, convertible bonds and expedited...

Economics

2 d. ago Tesla sees exodus of South Korean retail investors as crypto’s allure rises

South Korea’s retail investors are losing faith in Tesla’s stock, ramping up their selling last month amid growing disillusionment with the electric carmaker and rising interest in cryptocurrencies. Individual investors in South Korea sold a net US$657 million of Tesla stock in August, the largest outflow since at least early 2023, according to Bloomberg calculations of depository data. Investors have instead favoured even more volatile bets such as Bitmine Immersion Technologies, seen as a...

Economics

2 d. ago South Korea’s Samsung, SK Hynix stocks sag after US revokes China chip permits

Shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix slid on Monday after the Trump administration decided to make it harder for the world’s largest memory chipmakers to ship critical equipment to their giant Chinese operations. The surprise ruling deals a potential blow to their production in the world’s largest semiconductor market. While both South Korean companies have memory plants in their home market, China accounts for a major slice of their global output. Samsung sank more than 2 per cent, while...

Politics

3 d. ago Eric Trump heads to Tokyo after Hong Kong for bitcoin firm meeting

Eric Trump is expected to attend a shareholder meeting of Japanese bitcoin treasury company Metaplanet in Tokyo on Monday, as the US president’s family expands its crypto ventures internationally. Eric Trump, the second son of President Donald Trump, was named in March as an adviser to Metaplanet, which holds more than US$2 billion in bitcoin, and his attendance would follow an appearance last week at the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong. American Bitcoin, a miner of the cryptocurrency...

Politics

4 d. ago Justin Sun eyes ‘Swift’ for virtual asset sector, praises Hong Kong crypto moves

Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun says he is trying to establish the Tron blockchain, which he founded and launched in 2018, as the virtual asset industry’s answer to Swift – the main messaging network used by the global banking system – on the back of a surge in stablecoin transactions around the world. “I estimate that our facilitated transactions will exceed Swift’s in the next five years,” Sun, 35, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. He added that the transaction...

Politics

4 d. ago Alibaba sees strong consumer mindshare in instant commerce push

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding has won “consumer mindshare” amid its instant commerce push, according to company executives and analysts, to regain growth momentum in the highly competitive domestic market. The Chinese tech conglomerate’s New York-listed shares jumped 13 per cent to close at US$135 on Friday, after reporting robust earnings growth in the June quarter on the back of confidence on the mainland’s instant commerce sector. On Friday’s earnings call, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu...

Politics

5 d. ago First ‘universal’ 6G chip, China’s ‘cyberpunk’ cities: SCMP daily highlights

Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China unveils world’s first ‘all-frequency’ 6G chip capable of 100Gbps speeds Chinese scientists have developed the world’s first “all-frequency” 6G chip that could help bridge the digital divide between rural and urban communities. 2. Chinese firms adapting as US ends de minimis exemptions for rest of world As the United States ends import duty exemptions...

Politics

5 d. ago Tech war: Huawei executive claims victory over US sanctions with tech ecosystem

China has virtually overcome crippling US tech restrictions, according to a senior executive at Huawei Technologies, as mainland-developed computing infrastructure, AI systems and other software now rival those from the world’s largest economy. Shenzhen-based Huawei, which was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in May 2019, has already “built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States”, said Tao Jingwen, president of the firm’s quality, business process and information technology...

Events

5 d. ago Alibaba’s quarterly profit surges 78% on equity investments, disposals

Alibaba Group Holding, China’s e-commerce and cloud computing services giant, on Friday reported a 78 per cent surge in profit for the June quarter, while “robust AI demand” led to 26 per cent revenue growth for its cloud business. Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders advanced 78 per cent 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...

Economics