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YOUR WEEKLY TECH INSIGHT FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE

Friday May 12 2023

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CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com steps down after just one year as company swings to profit

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, which is a rival to Alibaba in China, said net sales for the first quarter rose 1.4% year on year to 243 billion Chinese yuan ($35 billion). That number beat an analysts’ average estimate of 239.42 billion yuan, according to Refinitiv data.

Net profit came in at 6.3 billion yuan versus a loss of 3 billion yuan in the same period last year.

CEO stepping down

JD also announced a management change on Thursday. The company said its current CEO Xu Lei will step down from the role in June “due to personal reasons.” Xu has only been CEO for around a year after taking over from JD’s founder Richard Liu.

Xu will serve as the first chairman of the advisory council of JD.com and “continue to participate in the high-quality development” of the company, JD.com said in a statement.

Incoming new management

Sandy Ran Xu, the current chief financial officer of JD.com, has been appointed as the CEO and an executive director of the Beijing-headquartered firm.

She has served as CFO of JD.com since June 2020 and joined the firm in July 2018. Prior to her role at the e-commerce firm, she was an audit partner and spent nearly 20 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers in China and the U.S.

Ian Su Shan, the current CFO of JD Logistics, will take over as CFO of JD.

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SoftBank posts record $32 billion loss at its Vision Fund tech investment arm

SoftBank’s Vision Fund segment posted a 4.3 trillion Japanese yen ($32 billion) loss for its fiscal year ending March 31 versus a 2.55 trillion yen loss in the same period a year before.

Overall, SoftBank posted a net loss of 970.14 billion yen for the fiscal year, narrower than the 1.7 trillion loss in the same period a year before.

Offloading investments

SoftBank said that it logged losses in areas including the share prices of Chinese artificial intelligence firm SenseTime and Indonesian ride-hailing and e-commerce company GoTo.

Over the past year, SoftBank has been exiting some of its highest-profile investments to raise cash. It narrowed its overall losses through sales of shares in T-Mobile and Alibaba. It continues to offload some of its shares in the latter company via a derivative called a forward contract, after Son made his fortune with an early investment in Alibaba more than two decades ago.

In August, it said it had sold its remaining stake in U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber.

Looking ahead to Arm IPO

The companies that SoftBank has invested in are well capitalized, according to the Japanese giant’s Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto. He said SoftBank has a number of companies ready to go public, which are valued at a combined $37 billion. He did not name these companies.

Now investors are looking toward the initial public offering of British semiconductor firm Arm, which is owned by SoftBank. Last month, Arm filed confidentially for a listing in the U.S.

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Nintendo Switch sales plunge 22% and the gaming giant expects further declines

For Nintendo’s full fiscal year, which ran from April 2022 and ended March 31 this year, the Kyoto-based company reported revenue of 1.6 trillion yen, meeting its own forecast. That was a 5.5% year-on-year decline.

Nintendo reported 432.7 billion yen in net profit for the fiscal year, down more than 9% year on year. However, it was better than the company’s own forecast of 370 billion yen.

Switch sales slumped

The Japanese gaming giant sold 17.97 million units of its flagship Nintendo Switch console series, in line with its own forecast of 18 million units for the fiscal year.

That compares to just over 23 million Switch units sold in the fiscal year ended Mar. 2022, a 22% decline.

Nintendo said the company “did not experience the growth in sales mainly during the holiday season” that it saw in the previous year.

For the fiscal year ended March 2024, Nintendo forecast sales of 15 million units of the Switch.

Past its peak

“The Nintendo Switch had a fantastic run but definitely passed its peak,” Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games, told CNBC.

The key for Nintendo now is how it continues to rake in revenue from its 114 million annual paying users. The gaming giant has a strong range of games and recognizable characters from Pokemon to Mario.

However, Nintendo said software sales totaled 213.96 million units for the year ended March 31, down 9% year on year.

Nintendo said it expects net profit to fall 21.4% to 340 billion yen in the year ended March 2024.

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Chinese police arrest man who allegedly used ChatGPT to spread fake news in first case of its kind

Chinese police arrested a man they allege used ChatGPT to create a fake news article about a train crash, in what appears to be the first case of enforcement action being taken in China under an unprecedented law related to artificial intelligence.

The case highlights Chinese authorities’ push to regulate and control uses of AI as the technology gets more advanced.

AI-generated fake news

Police in Gansu province in northwest China detained a man, surnamed Hong, who they said allegedly fabricated a news story regarding a train crash that caused nine deaths.

The authorities found that more than 20 accounts had posted this article on a blogging platform owned by Chinese search giant Baidu and they’d garnered more than 15,000 views.

Hong allegedly used ChatGPT to create slightly different versions of the fake news article to pass duplication checks on the Baidu-owned platform.

‘Deep synthesis technologies’ rules

The Gansu police authorities arrested Hong under the first-of-its kind law governing “deep synthesis technologies” which China introduced this year.

Deep synthesis technologies refer to AI being used to generate text, images, video or other media. The law states that deep synthesis services cannot be used to disseminate fake news.

China drafted the law as ChatGPT was taking off and going viral, as authorities looked to get ahead of the technology. China’s internet is heavily censored and controlled. Beijing has sought to introduce laws governing new technologies which could present concerns to the central government.

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Three decades after inventing the web, Tim Berners-Lee has some ideas on how to fix it

The internet landscape is now disempowering for individuals, and its inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Inrupt CEO John Bruce share their visions for the future of the web.

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