Welcome back,
Here we are, folks, 2025 has arrived. In India, the body governing mobile payments hasn’t been sitting around idly watching the new year arrive—it released two highly-anticipated updates at the end of December. Most eye-catching is the decision to allow WhatsApp to go ahead and offer payments to everyone in the country, but don’t get carried away thinking this is game over, the Meta-owned service will do well to make any kind of dent in the market.
Elsewhere, an upcoming book chronicles Huawei’s unlikely rebirth in the face of hard-hitting US sanctions over recent years, and India has released a draft data protection bill.
Have a great week settling into the pace of the New Year, we’ll be back with more Asia tech news.
Jon
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India has opened the new year with two significant announcements around payments, working right to the end of 2024:
Taken together, these are significant moves designed to increase competition and avoid overly dominant players in the payment market in India. Right now, two players dominate UPI, which handles some 13 billion transactions per month.
Image via Deepak Abbot
PhonePe, majority owned by Walmart, has an estimated 47.8% of the market with Google Pay said to account for 37%. The goal is to reduce each one’s share, and allowing WhatsApp to finally grow beyond its 100M mark would appear to be a strategy. However, it might not be so simple as Deepak Abbot, a fintech founder and former executive at payments startup Paytm, opines. (You should go read his post in full.)
Abbot—who now runs startup Indiagold—argues that only 100M of the 360-375m UPI users are responsible for the majority of payment volume (65%) and they have most likely already chosen their payment app of choice. So it would take a gargantuan effort to prize them away to a new app (WhatsApp Pay) or drive growth among other users.
WhatsApp has fewer than 10 million active UPI users, despite having 100 million registered WhatsApp Pay users. That indicates that simply removing its user cap isn’t going to massively increase its market share. One of Abbot’s colleagues wrote last year why WhatsApp Pay isn’t groundbreaking: in short, the market is busy and WhatsApp’s product isn’t as seamless as others.
Abbott predicts, with good reason, that the 30% threshold may be impossible to achieve. Clearly it’s a topic that the NPCI feels strongly about so we will see what other strategies it adopts. For WhatsApp, it’s an interesting twist: it had initially been gatekept but now it is seen as a tool to help achieve NPCI’s goal. But the timing looks like it is years too late.
Despite the US government going full gun against it, Huawei hasn’t just survived, its business is flourishing.
That’s the message from an upcoming book from technology journalist Eva Dou, ‘House of Huawei’: The secret history of China’s most powerful company.
Huawei’s rise had been a Sputnik moment. It had changed the way that people around the world thought about innovation, trade, and their own pasts and futures. “A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army,” Ren had told General Secretary Jiang Zemin back in 1994, as he argued for China’s central government to increase investment in telecommunications gear. Similar calls were now being made in nations worldwide — including in the United States.
This wave of protectionism — Trump dubbed it “America First,” Beijing called it “Made in China 2025,” and other countries had their own terms — wasn’t a complete retreat from globalization. That was impossible. But it was an acknowledgment that stock prices and balance sheets could not fully capture the societal value of a nation’s technological competency — nor could they fully express the feeling of loss when that was gone.
Elsewhere:
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Huawei said its academies now train over 300,000 engineers per year, across 110 countries
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The company said its revenue in the first half of 2024 rose 34.3% year-on-year to $57.21B
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And market share of foreign smartphone brands in China dropped by close to 50% over the last year, with Huawei’s figures jumping 34% in Q3
India has released a draft for its Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which is now open to public consultation for the next month and a half.
We picked out the key highlights:
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User Rights: Users will have enhanced rights over their personal data, including rights to access, correct, or delete their data.
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Parental Consent for Children: For children under 18, parental consent will be required for data processing, particularly for creating social media accounts.
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Data Localisation: The draft proposes that certain personal data must be stored within India, impacting how tech giants manage data storage and potentially increasing operational costs.
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Data Breach Notifications: Companies must notify the Data Protection Board within 72 hours of a data breach and inform affected users in a timely manner.
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Consent Management: The rules introduce the concept of ‘Consent Managers’ to handle user consent, requiring businesses to manage consent more transparently and with greater accountability.
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Cross-Border Data Transfer: There are strict rules on transferring personal data outside of India, with exceptions for ‘trusted jurisdictions’ as determined by the government.
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Penalties for Non-Compliance: While the draft does not specify penalties, the underlying Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP) allows for fines up to Rs 250 crore for significant violations.
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Significant Data Fiduciaries: Companies handling large volumes of sensitive data are labeled as “Significant Data Fiduciaries” with additional compliance obligations like appointing a Data Protection Officer in India.
China’s short video market has hit a turning point, with user numbers shrinking for the first time, according to an industry report—users of platforms like ByteDance’s Douyin, Kuaishou, and Tencent’s WeChat fell to 1.05B in June, down 300M from December 2023, according to data from the National Radio and Television Administration link
Baidu’s Robin Li predicts ‘exponential’ boom in AI apps in China this year link
AI firms are in a brutal price war exemplified by Alibaba cutting the price of its visual model by 85% on the final of 2024 link
Alibaba Cloud is partnering with Chinese start-up 01.AI, founded by ex-Google China head Lee Kai-fu, to develop AI models link
Alipay introduced “Tanyixia,” an AI-powered feature that generates information from user-uploaded images—the tool identifies plants, animals, food, and translates menus and instructions, moves aimed at reinforcing Alipay’s status as a super app for its one billion users link
Major Chinese platforms pledged to improve their algorithms after a regulatory crackdown on misuse link
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Douyin will launch a safety center to boost transparency, diversify content, and combat misinformation
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Pinduoduo aims to curb price discrimination
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Xiaohongshu invited user feedback on its algorithms and reminded users they can disable personalized recommendations
Beijing plans to expand driverless vehicle use, with new regulations effective April 1 allowing road trials for vehicles passing safety tests link
The government is also pushing for EVs to use China-made chips, interesting timing given that the US is now probing how China uses “extensive anticompetitive and non-market means” to subsidize EVs and flood the global markets with China-made vehicles link
Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached the computers of senior U.S. Treasury officials, accessing unclassified data, according to sources link
The US sanctioned Beijing-based Integrity Technology Group for aiding state-sponsored hackers targeting critical infrastructure. Officials say it provided China’s Ministry of State Security and hacking groups, including Flax Typhoon, with attack infrastructure from mid-2022 to late 2023 link
US investors in Chinese venture capital funds are scrambling to comply with new Biden administration rules banning investments in technologies tied to China’s military, including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing link
Alibaba will sell its entire stake in Sun Art, China’s largest hypermarket operator, to PE firm CDP Capital for HK$13.1B (US$1.7B)—the deal will mark a loss of around $1.8B for the firm as part of its move away from physical retail link
China plans to tighten export restrictions on technology for battery components and metal processing amid rising global trade tensions link
Wingtech Technology, a Chinese Apple supplier, plans to divest its consumer electronics manufacturing business to focus on semiconductors, citing geopolitical tensions link
UK lawmakers have summoned Shein and Temu for questioning over labour practices link
WPS Office, a Microsoft Office alternative made by Chinese developer Kingsoft Office, has hit 100M daily active users—a key milestone as it bids to develop a home-made alternative to the hugely popular software series link
TikTok has long been aware its livestreams promote sexual content, including exploitation and grooming of minors, according to documents that are part of an unredacted Utah lawsuit link
VC firm Accel closed $650M for its eighth India fund—its big winners include Flipkart, Swiggy and Freshworks. Interestingly, the firm told TechCrunch that it could have raised “billions” but opted to stick to an optimal size to ensure quality returns… is that throwing shade on funds that did raise billions such as Peak XV? link
A number of prominent VPN apps were removed from the Apple Store Store and Google Play store in India following government orders link
This enforcement action marks the first significant implementation of India’s 2022 regulatory framework governing VPN apps. The rules mandate that VPN providers and cloud service operators maintain comprehensive records of their customers, including names, addresses, IP addresses, and transaction histories, for a five-year period.
Quick commerce startup Zepto reportedly plans to file for an IPO by March or April after it securing approval to shift its holding entity from Singapore to India link
Reliance Retail has written off its $200M investment in troubled hyperlocal startup Dunzo, while CEO Kabeer Biswas is in talks with high-net-worth individuals and family offices for a potential acquisition valuing the startup $25M-$30M link
Biswas is being linked with joining Flipkart Minutes as head of operations, the quick commerce arm of Walmart-owned Flipkart link
eFishery, a billion-dollar startup that produces smart feeders for fish and shrimp farmers, appointed an interim CEO and CFO as its investor continue to investigate allegations of financial irregularities against co-founders Gibran Huzaifah and Chrisna Aditya, CEO and chief product officer, respectively link
Malaysia has granted WeChat and TikTok licences to operate under new law—Telegram and Meta are among those that are close to receiving the green light or in the process of applying link
Elon Musk’s X and Google’s YouTube have yet to apply for a social media operating license under the Malaysian law, however, even though it took effect this month link
Do Kwon has pled not guilty to US criminal charges relating to the collapse of Terra/Luna in 2022, two digital currencies that lost around $40B link
Pony.ai plans to launch robotaxis in Hong Kong, competing with Baidu as Chinese autonomous driving firms expand internationally link
NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier, confirmed that a DDoS attack disrupted some services, including mobile payments, last week link
