Grab unveiled three new services, GrabCar Plus, GrabAssist and GrabFamily on Monday. The last two services are respectively built on Uber’s previous offerings uberASSIST and Uber Car Seat.
The Singapore-headquartered ride-hailing company is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion to fuel expansion in SE Asia.
KrASIA Daily is a three-minute read to brief you everything you need to know to start your day. We only choose the latest tech & startup news that is worth your time, with a focus on Southeast Asia and China.
Southeast Asia:
Singapore: Grab is expanding its platter of ride-hailing services to cater to more specific pockets of customers, namely families with toddlers, passengers with mobility needs, and those who want a “premium economy” service. (ST)
SE Asia: iPrice, a service that aggregates Southeast Asia’s e-commerce websites in a single destination, has pulled in new funding led by messaging app Line’s VC arm, Line Ventures. (TechCrunch)
Singapore: Singapore government-owned sovereign fund Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd plans to acquire a significant minority stake in digital payments platformPine Labs for $350-400 million, two people aware of the development said. (Deal Street Asia)
Singapore & Vietnam: MVL (Mass Vehicle Ledger) Foundation – a Singaporean blockchain-based mobility ecosystem – just announced that they will launch a new ride-hailing app in Vietnam in a media release sent to Saigoneer. The app’s main appeal is that it offers a zero percent commission fee for all rides for drivers, while only charging a “negligible transaction fee” for the platform’s maintenance. (Saigoneer)
Singapore: Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-founded accelerator, launched a Singapore programme to help build Singapore’s startup and innovation community in 2016, which since has had 2,400 applications from aspiring entrepreneurs. (KrASIA)
China:
China’s bike-sharing giant Ofo has ordered only about 80k bicycles from bike manufacturer Shanghai Phoenix so far this year, far less than the anticipated 5 million bikes per year, in part because some Chinese cities have banned the further deployment of shared bikes, according to China’s tech news service Technode. (KrASIA)
Xiaomi announced on last Thursday a partnership with HK-listed CK Hutchison Holdings Limited to sell its smartphones, home appliances and gadgets in 17,700 stores of the latter company in Hong Kong and six European countries including the UK and Sweden, revealing the Chinese smartphone manufacturer’s ambition to ramp up its presence in the global market which brought in 28% of the company’s total revenue in 2017. (KrASIA)
ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications firm in the crossfire of a U.S.-China trade fight, has asked the U.S. government for a stay of its order banning American companies from selling to the firm. (WSJ)
Shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. continued to rally today after the firm posted record earning’s growth for the fiscal year 2017-2018 on Friday, helping it to leapfrog tech rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. as China’s top company by market capitalization. (Yicai)
Ping An Healthcare and Technology Co Ltd’s shares tumbled as much as 11 percent on their second day of trading on Monday as investors worried about the high valuations for the loss-making firm that saw Hong Kong’s largest new listing in 2018. (Reuters)
An online essay criticising Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings for driving growth these days through investments rather than original innovation has sparked a heated debate in China, with rival technology company CEOs weighing in to voice their opinions. (SCMP)
Baidu, which has ambitions to build an operating system for autonomous cars, requires more human intervention during road tests in the US compared with Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet. (SCMP)
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known asFoxconn and the world’s largest contract iPhone maker, has reportedly formed a new subsidiary to exploit the thriving semiconductor industry. (Yicai)
World:
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett on Monday said buyers of bitcoin, which he has characterized as “rat poison squared,” thrive on the hope they’ll find other people who will pay more for it. (Reuters)
Apple opened at a record high Monday, surpassing $185 for the first time, as Warren Buffett doubled down on his praise for the company. (CNBC)
Britain’s data privacy watchdog has ordered Cambridge Analytica to hand over all the personal information it holds on a U.S. academic, confirming the right of people abroad to seek data held by a UK firm. (Reuters)