Month: November 2020

As Ant Group seizes the world’s attention with its record initial public offering, which was abruptly called off by Beijing, investors and analysts are revisiting Tencent’s fintech interests, recognized as Ant’s archrival in China.

It’s somewhat complicated to do this, not least because they are sprawled across a number of Tencent properties and, unlike Ant, don’t go by a single brand or operational structure — at least, not one that is obvious to the outside world.

However, when you tease out Tencent’s fintech activity across its wider footprint — from direct operations like WeChat Pay through to its sizeable strategic investments and third-party marketplaces — you have something comparable in size to Ant, and in some services even bigger.

Hidden business

Ant refuted the comparison with Tencent or anyone else. In a reply to China’s securities regulator in September, the Jack Ma-controlled, Alibaba-backed fintech giant said it is “not comparable” to WeChat Pay, the fintech tool inside WeChat, Tencent’s flagship messenger.

“In the space of digital payments and merchant service, there are many players around the world, including Tencent’s WeChat Pay. But the payments services offered by these companies are different from our digital payments and merchant services. They are not comparable. In terms of digital finance, our way of working with and serving financial institutions, as well as our revenue model, are novel and do not have a counterpart,” the company noted in a somewhat hubristic reply.

There’s no denying that Ant is a pioneer in expanding financial inclusion in China, where millions remain outside the formal banking system. But Tencent has played catch-up in digital finance and made major headway, especially in electronic payments.

Both companies ventured into fintech by first offering consumers a way to pay digitally, though the brands “Alipay” and “WeChat Pay” fail to reflect the breadth of services touted by the platforms today. Alipay, Ant’s flagship app, is now a comprehensive marketplace selling Ant’s in-house products and myriad third-party ones like micro-loans and insurance. The app, like WeChat Pay, also facilitates a growing list of public services, letting users see their taxes, pay utility bills, book a hospital visit and more.

Tencent, on the other hand, embeds its financial services inside the payment features of WeChat (WeChat Pay) and the giant’s other popular chat app, QQ. It has thus been historically difficult to make out how much Tencent earns from fintech, something the giant doesn’t disclose in its earnings reports. This is reflective of Tencent’s “horse racing” internal competition, in which departments and teams often rival fiercely against each other rather than actively collaborate.

As such, we have pulled together estimates of Tencent’s fintech businesses ourselves using a mix of quarterly reports and third-party research — a mark of how un-transparent some of this really is — but it begs some interesting questions. Will (should?) Tencent at some point follow in Alibaba’s footsteps to bring its own fintech operations under one umbrella?

User number

In terms of user size, the rivals are going neck and neck.

The Alipay app recorded 711 monthly active users and 80 million monthly merchants in June. Among its 1 billion annual users, 729 million had transacted in at least one “financial service” through the platform. As in the PayPal-eBay relationship, Alipay benefits tremendously by being the default payments processor for Alibaba marketplaces like Taobao.

As of 2019, more than 800 million users and 50 million merchants used WeChat to pay monthly, a big chunk of the 1.2 billion active user base of the messenger. It’s unclear how many people tried Tencent’s other fintech products, though the firm did say about 200 million people used its wealth management service in 2019.

Revenue

Ant reported a total of 121 billion yuan or $17 billion in revenue last year, nearly doubling its sum from 2017 and putting it on par with PayPal at $17.8 billion.

In 2019, Tencent generated 101 billion yuan of revenue from its “fintech and business services. The segment mainly consisted of fintech and cloud products, industry analysts told TechCrunch. With its cloud unit finishing the year at 17 billion yuan in revenue, we can venture to estimate that Tencent’s fintech products earned roughly or no more than 84 billion yuan ($12 billion), from the period — paled by Ant’s figure, but not bad for a relative latecomer.

The sheer size of the fintech giants has made them highly attractive targets of regulation. Increasingly, Ant is downplaying its “financial” angle and billing itself as a “technology” ally for traditional institutions rather than a challenger. These days, Alipay relies less on selling proprietary financial products and bills itself as an intermediary helping state banks, wealth managers and insurers to reach customers. In return for facilitating the process, Ant charges administrative fees from transactions on the platform.

Now, let’s turn to the rivals’ four main business focuses: payments, microloans, wealth management and insurance.

Digital payments

In the year ended June, Alipay processed a whopping 118 trillion yuan in payment transactions in China. That’s about $17 trillion and dwarfs the $172 billion that PayPal handled in 2019.

Tencent doesn’t disclose its payments transaction volume, but data from third-party research firms offer a hint of its scale. The industry consensus is that the two collectively control over 90% of China’s trillion-dollar electronic payments market where Alipay enjoys a slight lead.

Alipay processed 55.4% of China’s third-party payments transactions in the first quarter of 2020, according to market research firm iResearch, while another researcher Analysys said the firm’s share was 48.44% in the period. In comparison, Tenpay (the brand assigned to the company-wide infrastructure that powers WeChat Pay and the less-significant QQ Wallet, yet another name to confuse people) trailed behind at 38.8%, per iResearch data, and 34% according to Analysys.

At the end of the day, the two services have distinct user scenarios. The fact that WeChat Pay lies inside a messenger makes it a tool for social, often small, payments, such as splitting bills and exchanging lucky money, a custom in China. Alipay, on the other hand, is associated with online shopping.

That’s changing as Tencent tries to increase its ticket size through alliances. It’s tied WeChat Pay to portfolio e-commerce companies like JD.com, Pinduoduo and Meituan — all Alibaba’s competitors.

Third-party payments were once an incredibly profitable business. Platforms used to be able to hold customer reserve funds from which they generated handsome interests. That lucrative scheme came to a stop when Chinese regulators demanded non-bank payments providers to place 100% of customer deposit funds under a centralized, interest-free account last year. What’s left for payment processors to earn are limited fees charged from merchants.

Payments still account for the bulk of Ant’s revenues — 43%, or a total of 51.9 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) in 2019, but the percentage was down from 55% in 2017, a sign of the giant’s diversifying business.

Microlending

Ant has become the go-to lender for shoppers and small businesses in a country where millions aren’t qualified for bank-issued credit cards. The firm had worked with about 100 banks, doling out 1.7 trillion yuan ($250 billion) of consumer loans and 400 billion yuan ($58 billion) of small business loans in the year ended June. That amounted to 41.9 billion yuan or 34.7% of Ant’s annual revenue.

The size of Tencent’s loan business is harder to gauge. What we do know is that Weilidai, the microloan product sold through WeChat, had issued an aggregate of 3.7 trillion yuan ($540 billion) to 28 million customers between its launch in 2015 and 2019, according to a report from WeBank, the Tencent-backed private bank that provides the WeChat-based loan.

Wealth management

As of June, Ant had 4.1 trillion yuan ($600 billion) assets under management, making it one of the world’s biggest money-market funds. Working with 170 partner asset managers, the segment brought in about 17 billion yuan or 14% of total revenue in 2019.

Tencent said its wealth management platform accumulated assets of over 600 billion yuan in 2018 and grew by 50% year-over-year in 2019. That should put its AUM in 2019 at around 900 billion yuan ($131 billion).

Insurance

Last but not least, both giants have made big pushes into consumer insurance. Besides featuring third-party plans, Alipay introduced a new way to insure customers: mutual aid. The novel scheme, which is not regulated as an insurance product in China, is free to sign up and does not charge any premium or upfront payment. Users pay small monthly fees that are pooled to pay for claims of critical illnesses.

Insurance premiums and mutual aid contributions on Ant’s platform reached 52 billion yuan, or $7.6 billion, in the year ended June. Working with about 90 partner insurers in China, the segment contributed nearly 9 billion yuan, or 7.4%, of the firm’s annual revenue. More than 570 million Alipay users participated in at least one insurance program in the year ended June.

Tencent, on the other hand, taps partners in its relatively uncharted territory. Its insurance strategy includes in-house platform WeSure that works like a middleman between insurers and consumers, and Tencent-backed Waterdrop, which provides both traditional insurances and a rival to Ant’s mutual aid product Xianghubao.

In the first half of 2020, WeSure, Tencent’s main insurance operation that sells through WeChat, paid out a total of 290 million yuan ($42.4 million), it announced. The unit does not disclose its amount of premiums or revenues, but we can find clues in other figures. Twenty-five million people used WeShare services in 2019 and the average premium amount per user was over 1,000 yuan ($151). That is, WeShare generated no more than 25 billion yuan, or $3.78 billion, in premium that year because the user figure also accounts for a good number of premium-free users.

*

Moving forward, it remains unclear whether Tencent will restructure its fintech operations in a more cohesive and collaborative way. As they expand, will investors and regulators demand that? And what opportunities are there for others to compete in a space dominated by two huge players?

One thing is for sure: Tencent will need to tread more carefully on regulatory issues. Ant’s achievement is a win for entrepreneurs looking to “disrupt” China’s financial sector, but its halted IPO, which is tied to regulatory issues and reportedly Jack Ma’s hubris, also sounds an alarm to contenders that policymaking in China can be capricious.

Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup The Boring Company is eyeing Austin for its next project based on several new job postings.

The Boring Company, which last year landed a deal to construct and operate a “people mover” for the Las Vegas Convention Center, tweeted Monday that is was hiring in Austin. Engineering, accountant and business development positions are listed on its website, the type of jobs that suggest that The Boring Company sees enough opportunity in Austin to set up more permanent operations there.

Austin is becoming a hotbed of Musk-related activity. Tesla, which Musk leads, picked in July a site near Austin for its next U.S. factory, a four to five-million-square foot $1.1 billion plant that will assemble the automaker’s futuristic Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi and the Model Y and Model 3 for sales to customers on the East Coast.

Musk described the future factory as an “ecological paradise,” with a boardwalk and bike lanes and where the public will be welcome. It’s unclear if the first customer of The Boring Company will be Tesla.

The Boring Company has five product lines, all of which are centered around tunneling. The startup, which raised $120 million in new funding in summer 2019, offers the base tunnel to customers as well as those designed for use by utilities, pedestrians, freight and it’s so-called Loop service.

The company describes the Loop as an underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported via in autonomous vehicles at up to 150 miles per hour through tunnels between stations. The company says the autonomous vehicles are Tesla Model S, 3, and X. (It should be noted that while Tesla vehicles do have robust advanced driver assistance systems, they are not considered by government bodies such as the U.S. DOT as fully autonomous.)

The Loop is what Las Vegas Las Vegas Convention Center officials sprang for. Under its contract, the LVCC Loop is supposed to transport attendees through two 0.8-mile underground tunnels in Tesla vehicles, four or five at a time. Planning files reviewed by TechCrunch seem to show that the Loop system will not be able to move anywhere near the number of people LVCC wants, and that TBC agreed to.

Sony has announced that it is entering the drone market with a new brand called Airpeak, though the specifics of the drone itself are left something of a mystery. It plans to launch the project next spring.

The barebones announcement says only that Sony has been inspired by the “recent proliferation” of drones and the changes they have caused in both the industrial and creative sectors.

Airpeak will focus on multiple industries as well, though it has its work cut out for it if it intends to go up against DJI, which has become the first choice in the consumer UAV sector.

Sony describes the drone as being developed within “the field of AI robotics,” which, along with the aim to enable drone use where it was previously difficult to do so, suggests Sony plans to integrate a fair amount of intelligence into the drones’ systems.

Small UAVs have gotten smarter and smarter, able now to avoid obstacles, recognize other flying objects, and navigate between buildings without any intervention from their human operators. But many of these capabilities are still essentially theoretical rather than widely deployed.

Beyond the name, general flavor of the project, and a render of what is almost certainly a rotor, that is the sum total of what we know about Sony’s new project. Expect more to be posted to the official website in time.

Beyond Meat’s partnership with McDonald’s to develop the McPlant burger wasn’t enough to keep shares from collapsing after the company posted third-quarter earnings that fell far below analysts’ expectations.

The big miss sent shares tumbling nearly 29% in after markets closed Monday after reporting it generated $94.4 million in revenues and a loss of 28 cents per share vs the $132.8 million in revenue and 5 cents per share loss that analysts had expected.

“Our financial results reflect a quarter where for the first time since the pandemic began, we experienced the full brunt and unpredictability of COVID-19 on our net revenues and accordingly, throughout our P&L,” Beyond Meat’s president and chief executive, Ethan Brown, said in a statement. “Unlike the second quarter where record retail buying and freezer loading by consumers offset the deterioration of our foodservice business as COVID-19 stay-at-home and related measures set in, the long tail of retail stockpiling by consumers, coupled with continued challenges across the majority of our foodservice customers, led to Q3 results that were lower than we expected.”

The company reported losses of $19.3 million in the third quarter of 2020 compared to net income of $4.1 million in the year-ago period, according to a statement. Net loss per common share reached 31 cents per-share in the third quarter compared to 6 cents per-share in the year-ago-period.

Despite the poor performance, Beyond Meat is doubling down on its expansion plans by acquiring a new factory in Pennsylvania and its expansion in China and Europe. Brown also pointed to other data that suggests the business is growing.

“Even as the pandemic has created significant disruption, we continue to see strong growth in critically important metrics of household penetration, buyer rates, purchase frequency and repeat rates; our brand’s sales growth continues to outpace the category; and during the quarter we saw our year-over-year velocities rise even as we grew distribution,” he said in a statement.

Beyond Meat’s third-quarter earnings report capped a volatile day for the company that saw its share price seesaw as details of the McDonald’s plant-based burger emerged. Shares of Beyond Meat initially fell after McDonald’s announced that its new plant-based patty and chicken substitute formulation was made in-house. However, McDonald’s overstated its own role in the creation of its McPlant, which was actually developed in conjunction with Beyond Meat, according to a statement provided to CNBC. Beyond Meat shares rebounded only to fall again after the market closed due to its third-quarter earnings.

Brown stuck by McDonald’s despite the restaurant chain’s decision to leave Beyond Meat out of its initial announcement.

“Our relationship with McDonald’s is really good and really strong,” Brown said on an investor call. “I respect their decision to refer to the McPlant platform in the generic sense. We are working with them on a number of matters.”

 

 

 

Back before just about every major TV network built a streaming app of their own, watching live TV on your smartphone was… tricky.

One of the first relatively simple options was the Slingbox. You’d set it up between your cable box and your TV, plug it into your network, and bam: you’re streaming live TV, from your TV, wherever you might be. You could even control it as if you were actually there, thanks to a spiderweb of IR transmitters you’d wire up in your entertainment center to act as your extra-remote remote control.

In the mid-2000s, it seemed like magic. In 2020, it’s… not quite as necessary. As a result, the company behind the Slingbox has announced that all Slingbox products are now discontinued, and will become less and less functional leading up to a full shutdown two years from today.

Writes the company in an announcement FAQ:

Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months after the discontinued announcement date (November 9, 2020), at which point ALL Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable.

Until then, most Slingbox models will continue to work normally, but the number of supported devices for viewing will steadily decrease as versions of the SlingPlayer apps become outdated and/or lose compatibility.

As for anyone who wants to keep using their Slingbox until the servers are shuttered? That’s a bit trickier.

The company says that (for now) they’ll continue to offer the required SlingPlayer app for iPhones, iPads, older versions of macOS, Windows, and Amazon Fire TV and tablets — but don’t expect any updates, and even those apps could vanish suddenly. The SlingPlayer apps for Roku devices and Windows Phones (RIP), meanwhile, are gone already.

Of course, the writing has been on the wall here for years now. Slingbox was acquired by EchoStar for $380 million in 2007; by 2017, they’d stopped manufacturing new hardware and were mostly focusing on integrating the technology directly into Dish Network boxes. Hell, they haven’t even tweeted in nearly two years. If you’ve still got a Slingbox setup that seems to be working, you’ve got a little under two years (max) to figure out something else.

We review the iPhone 12 Pro Max and the iPhone 12 mini, Zoom settles with the FTC and Pfizer announces promising results for its COVID-19 vaccine trial. This is your Daily Crunch for November 9, 2020.

The big story: Reviewing the biggest and smallest new iPhones

TechCrunch Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino tackled both extremes of the new iPhone 12 lineup today, publishing reviews of the Pro Max and the mini.

It sounds like he’s impressed with both of them. The iPhone 12 Pro Max, he writes, has “a really, really great camera” — the question is whether you’re willing to make the ergonomic trade-off, since you’ll probably need to use two hands with the larger phone. At the same time, he suggests that the iPhone 12 mini might be “the most attractive phone in the lineup.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Matthew also checked out the MagSafe Duo charger, a dual magnetic charger that he found underwhelming.

The tech giants

Zoom settles with FTC after making ‘deceptive’ security claims — The FTC previously accused Zoom of engaging in “a series of deceptive and unfair practices,” in part by claiming its encryption was stronger than it actually was.

Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B — This deal gives Adobe more online marketing tooling to fit into its Experience Cloud.

Beyond Meat shares rise on news that it collaborated with McDonald’s on the McPlant options — While McDonald’s initial announcement made it sound like the McPlant was developed entirely in-house, the new vegetarian option is actually a collaboration with Beyond Meat.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro hits $5 billion valuation on fresh funding of $500 million — Nuro was founded in June 2016 by former Google engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu.

MSCHF’s Push Party raises an unconventional seed round at a $200 million valuation — MSCHF is poking a little fun at the venture industry and perhaps publications like TechCrunch, too.

Bumble’s new feature prevents bad actors from using ‘unmatch’ to hide from their victims — This will make it harder for harassers to avoid having their conversation reported to Bumble’s safety team.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Five UX design research mistakes you can stop making today — Jason Buhle writes that while working with startups and tech companies, he’s seen that even people who understand the importance of user research don’t necessarily know how to conduct it in optimal ways.

What happens to high-flying startups if the pandemic trade flips? — An effective vaccine trial is shaking up public companies, unicorns and startups.

What we’ve learned about working from home seven months into the pandemic — We interview Karen Mangia, vice president of customer and market insights at Salesforce and author of “Working from Home, Making the New Normal Work for You.”

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine proves 90% effective in first results from Phase 3 clinical trial — This reflects only early results from the trial, rather than the final verified result, but it’s still extremely promising.

NASA partners with SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin and others for test flights and research — While no money will change hands, NASA will dedicate millions in personnel and other support to these test launches and developing technologies.

Original Content podcast: ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ is the historical chess drama we need right now — Somehow, the show makes competitive chess seem thrilling.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Twitter is working to expand the use of its “misinformation” labels on misleading tweets. The company has developed a new feature, not yet live, that would pop up a “misleading information” label when a user tries to “Like” a tweet that’s been labeled as misinformation.

The feature was discovered by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong in the Twitter app code. She confirms the addition doesn’t prevent a user from continuing to “Like” the tweet, however — it just slows you down.

A similar warning appears today when users attempt to retweet posts labeled as containing misinformation.

This new feature would fall in line with other measures Twitter has been taking to slow the spread of misinformation on its service, including a recent change to how retweets work. On October 20, 2020, Twitter began to prompt anyone who goes to retweet something to share a quote tweet instead.

The added bit of friction is meant to help users pause and think about what they’re amplifying, as did the change which pushed users to click through and actually read the content they’re sharing.

In addition, Twitter also rolled out a series of new policies ahead of Election Day in the U.S., to further guide its handling of misleading tweets. Beyond just labeling misinformation, it applied more aggressive warnings and restrictions on tweets from U.S. political figures, including candidates and campaign accounts, as well as other U.S.-based accounts that met certain thresholds in terms of followers, or tweet engagements.

Warnings were placed over tweets claiming premature victory, and had been designed largely in response to Trump’s broad hints that he would not easily concede. But use of these aggressive warnings may dwindle in the weeks and months ahead, given that Trump’s legal challenges do not look promising.

Though the election may have highlighted the problem with misinformation to a greater degree than usual, it remains a significant problem for today’s social platforms to address. There are now a number of users who don’t want to deal in facts, resorting to even calling fact-checking organizations biased against them. It’s unclear that any user interface tweaks at this point can help solve this problem.

Twitter says it tries to deamplify misinformation today by not allowing those labeled, misleading tweets to appear in Search or injected into users’ Timelines (if they don’t follow the account). But those tweets can still be replied to, liked and retweeted.

Twitter confirmed the feature spotted by Wong is in development, but did not have a time frame to its rollout.

“Our goal is to give people the context and tools necessary to find credible information on our service — no matter the topic or where they are seeing the Tweet,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “This is an iterative process, and we’re continuing to explore features and policies to help people on Twitter make their own informed decisions.”

 

 

Uber shares surged 7.38% to close at $48.18 following news that a vaccine candidate is 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and could start coming to market in a matter of months.

The announcement by drugmakers Pfizer and BioNTech sparked widespread optimism and helped boost shares across industries that have been weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic, including services like ride-hailing.

Uber’s share pop is notable beyond this one-day vaccine-news boost. This is the highest close for Uber since its public market debut in May 2019. This is also the first time since June 2019 that shares closed above its $45 IPO price.

Uber shares have been on an upswing over the past week in response to the passage of Proposition 22, a California ballot measure that allows companies to continue to classify gig workers as independent contractors. Uber, Lyft and other companies that rely on gig workers would have faced an expensive restructuring had voters rejected Prop 22.

Just days later, Uber reported its third-quarter earnings, results that revealed the disparate yet intertwining stories of its two core business segments. Uber’s ride-hailing business shrank, but made money, while its food delivery business expanded while continuing to lose money.

Uber didn’t meet investor expectations on revenue in the third quarter, which put some temporary downward pressure on shares. That drop proved to be short-lived as investors put more weight on the impact of the Prop 22 passage and today’s vaccine candidate news.

NASA has announced 20 new partnerships with commercial space outfits, among them collaborations with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab. While no money will change hands, NASA will dedicate millions in personnel and other support to these test launches and developing technologies.

The partnerships are NASA’s Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity selections for 2020. These agreements are unlike the SBIR or NIAC programs in that NASA doesn’t just send some money out and say “let us know how you’re getting on in 6 months or so.”

Instead, the space agency offers open access to its facilities and experts, some of which are the most advanced in the world. It’s a true public-private partnership, for which reason it is still a competitive process to get a project approved — and the list of 17 companies includes several large ones.

SpaceX will be working with Langley to monitor and perform thermal measurements of its Starship launch vehicle and spacecraft during reentry operations over the Pacific.

Rocket Lab, similarly, will partner with Langley, Ames, and Armstrong to do analysis of its Electron launch vehicle as it migrates the hardware towards reusability. The company recently moved up the date it would attempt a full booster recovery to just a week from now, but it’s unclear whether this is an operation NASA will be involved in.

Blue Origin, meanwhile, has two separate partnerships. One is another multi-center effort in which the company will be helping develop a “space robot operating system.” This sounds grand but is probably more of an integration effort, bringing together multiple open source and NASA-developed frameworks to work together, reducing costs and improving interoperability.

The other is regarding using 3D printing to improve engine designs; perhaps they regret letting Tim Ellis run away and start Relativity Space — he cut his teeth doing just this kind of work at Blue Origin and now it appears the company is going to have to play catch-up.

The rest of the partnerships, from artificial lunar regolith to radio-frequency propulsion, can be read about at this NASA post.