Welcome to China Business News, NEO’s weekly roundup of top business developments as reported by news outlets in China and the region.
This week’s highlights:
- State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) and Alibaba recently signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two companies will cooperate on new energy and digitization to enhance productivity, work together on strategic opportunities research and technological innovation, and explore ways of reducing their carbon footprints through a “new energy + digitalization” strategy. Specifically, Alibaba will use its technological capacities to facilitate SPIC’s digital transformation, to construct a digital database, and to provide innovation in the development and use of “new rural energy”. Meanwhile, SPIC will help Alibaba to reach its “carbon neutral” goal by reducing its operational carbon footprint and carbon emissions in the value chain. Both sides will jointly commit to developing various specific areas of their industries such as “new energy + data centers”, “new energy + new retail”, “new energy + logistics”, “new energy + office area”. Alibaba and SPIC will also explore digital energy transformations for some specific areas, and will strive for rural revitalization by combining distributed solar energy solutions with smart agriculture and rural tourism. (The Economic Observer)
- Tencent and Bank of China have signed an agreement to cooperate on digital finance for enterprises. Tencent will use digital technology to help Bank of China improve the quality and efficiency of small and medium enterprises’ (SME) financial services and support the development of the real economy. Tencent FinTech will connect Bank of China’s open banking capabilities to provide convenient, secure and efficient one-stop services for SMEs which are not yet highly digitized and have breakpoints in financial fund management. This move will reduce enterprise costs and help the industry’s digital development. The Vice President of Bank of China said that in the overall process of promoting the digital transformation of industry it is important to implement inclusive sharing and support SMEs with their digital transformations. Tencent’s officials think that this cooperation will bring about multi-level positive changes for the whole industry. At present, Tencent has created more than 400 industry solutions in more than 30 industries and with more than 9,000 partners, helping many companies in China to accelerate their development. (Hexun Net)
- Ant Group gives global developers a glimpse of “Cryptography”, its trusted privacy computing framework. Ant Groups engineers say the framework supports almost all mainstream privacy computing technologies and can provide tailored solutions depending on the scenario. It is widely used in Ant Group’s internal large-scale businesses, as well as external financial and medical fields. Finance – being a data-intensive industry with a high degree of standardization – has become the first stop for privacy computing solutions. “Cryptography” will open up more privacy computing technology to small and medium-sized banks, which have significant demand for a user-friendly privacy computing system. When it comes to privacy computing technology compliance, the framework accounts for application scenarios in which a client’s business problem must be solved while protecting the privacy and security of the user. This approach is an improvement on existing frameworks from a data security perspective, and would also facilitate the implementation of laws and regulations. (Caixin)
