The Week's Top 5 China Tech Stories In Focus

Here are the story summaries of the Top 5 stories coming out of China’s fledgling tech sector this week:

Flying Cars Given Green Light To Take Off In Rural China

EHang Holdings Ltd. EH & local government Hefei in Anhui province are partnering to make flying cars. The $100 billion partnership will allow EHang to use areas of the remote Chinese province to build low-altitude economies. Low-altitude economies are ones which are mostly populated by flying cars and drones. EHang has just received permission from China’s Civil Aviation Administration to operate a two-passenger air taxi, the EH216-S.

A Hundred Rivers Gets Three Hundred Million Dollars

Baichuan, a generative AI start-up founded in April this year and now at Unicorn status already, has received $300 million in funding. Investors include Alibaba Group Holdings Limited BABA ,Tencent Holdings Limited TCEHY and Xiaomi Corp XIACF. The company’s name is derived from the phrase meaning “a hundred rivers” in Chinese, an allusion to the neural pathways employed by the company’s proprietary AI code.

Chinese Character-Based Ernie Now As Smart As Chat-GPT

Baidu Inc.’s BIDU founder Robin Li said this week that the company’s Ernie chatbot is now as advanced as Chat GPT in AI terms. Ernie has still to catch up to ChatGPT in terms of popularity, with just 45 million users vs. ChatPT’s 180 million users, but “Ernie is not inferior in any respect to GPT-4,” Li told an audience at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing Tuesday. The company hopes that Ernie will become the mainstay Chinese-language AI software, he added, beating out rivals Tencent and Alibaba.

New EV Plant Goes Ahead In The Land of Smiles

Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. Ltd. signed an agreement to invest 8.8 billion THB ($242 million) into a brand new-energy vehicle manufacturing plant in Thailand. The plant will spit out 100,000 EVs a year for the South East Asia, Australia and UK markets. The deal follows on the heels of a join venture between BYD Company Limited BYDDF and WHA Corp., one of Thailand’s largest car manufactures, to build a similar plant planned to go live next year with 150,000 EV annual manufacturing capacity.

Half A Billion Dollars To Put Hong Kong IPOs Back In Transit  

Asia e-commerce logistics giant J&T Global Express Ltd. said it was raising HK$3.92 billion ($501 million) this week in preparation for a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange next Friday (October 27). Cornerstone investors included Tencent, with $62 million, Singapore’s soverieign wealth fund Tesamsek, with $10 million and Sequoia Capital with $5 million. The IPO will potentially be the biggest for the Hong Kong this year, which has had one of its worst years for IPOs in over a decade in 2023.