It’s not just U.S. tech giants that fear iOS 14.5’s new App Tracking Transparency feature. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, with a market cap of $646.84 billion, is supposedly very worried, just like Facebook.
A report from The Information says Alibaba invited half a dozen marketing execs to its Hangzhou headquarters to discuss how to react to the new feature, which stops apps from tracking users across websites and third-party apps.
Today is Singles Day in China, the Alibaba version of Amazon’s Prime Day — and, from the sound of things, Apple has done pretty darn well out of it.
This year’s 24-hour shopping event has surpassed last year’s 213.5 billion yuan (more than $30 billion) record for gross merchandise value sold. The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max were reportedly two of the top-selling items during Singles Day.
Chinese online retailers have slashed iPhone prices for the second time this year.
The discounts are an effort to boost sales in an important market, where Apple recently suffered a 20 percent decline year-on-year. The first iPhone price cuts were rolled out in January.
The iPhone outsold Chinese rivals on Alibaba platforms during China’s Singles Day on November 11. Singles’ Day is a holiday in which people not in a relationship buy themselves gifts.
Alibaba, the e-commerce giant that is the equivalent of China’s Amazon, sold a record $30.8 billion in gross merchandise during the day. Apple’s position as number one mobile brand is therefore pretty darn impressive!
Apple’s HomePod speaker sales might be weaker than previously estimated by analysts. The latest quarterly research report from Strategy Analytics claims that HomePod sales numbers only totaled 700,000 units.
China’s Alibaba Group has launched a cut-price smart speaker to compete with the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple’s forthcoming HomePod, as announced at WWDC.
Called the “Tmall Genie,” after Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Tmall, the China-only device represents the company’s first step into artificial intelligence hardware. It is priced at 499 yuan ($73.42), which makes it significantly cheaper than the aforementioned rivals.
It’s a product with some holes in it and it’s the holes that could be of interest to Apple fans excited about the upcoming iPad Air 3.
A photo allegedly showing an Air 3 case has cutouts for a Smart Connector and four speakers. The Japanese Apple blog Macotakara raised the possibility of a beefed up iPad after seeing a case available for pre-order on Alibaba.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is redefining high tea.
Drones are taking to the skies in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to deliver tea to a test group of 450 shoppers using Alibaba’s website Taobao. The three-day trial of drone delivery service in the Chinese cities ends Friday as Alibaba continues to push its might across the globe.
Apple is still trying to get a license for Apple Pay in China, but its new friends at Alibaba are bringing Touch ID payments to the mainstream in China today, with an update to the popular Alipay app that gives iPhone owners the power to make purchases with a fingerprint.
Alipay, which boasts over 300 million users in China, is the e-payment branch of Alibaba which just had the biggest global IPO ever this year. Tim Cook and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma met this year to talk about an Alipay + Apple Pay partnership, and the addition of Touch ID support is a strong sign that Apple’s mobile payments solution could be added in the future.
Apple is talking to Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba about bringing Apple Pay to China, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
“Right now, I think what we can say is that this is focused on the China market for Apple,” senior Alibaba executive Joseph Tsai is quoted as saying. “We are positive about the potential cooperation, but it depends on the details being worked out.”
Tim Cook gave a rare public interview on Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s new tech conference, WSJD. The Apple CEO touched on a range of topics, including Apple Pay’s success, a big potential partnership, why the iPod classic was discontinued, and more.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Cook’s comments:
Snapchat is currently in talks with investors over a round of funding that could value the company at a mind-blowing $10 billion, according to sources for Bloomberg. That’s a little over half the $19 billion Facebook paid for WhatsApp, but double the $5 billion market cap currently held by BlackBerry.
Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has revealed that he recently spent $100 million on Apple shares in anticipation that they will rebound. The 59-year-old believes that Apple is a “very promising” investment, despite the current share price being almost 40% off its peak last September.
We’re still a few months away from Apple’s new iPhone unveiling, but that hasn’t stopped a number of Chinese retailers from selling the device in advance. They’re using the mockup pictures that have been circulating for weeks to make a quick buck from the hotly-anticipated handset, with some asking for as much as $8,600 a piece.
Following that questionable leak from Case-Mate last week, another iPhone 5 case has emerged that reinforces rumors of a device with a significantly larger display than that of the iPhone 4, coupled with a thinner, tapered design.
