“Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent reported — most of the earnings were a beat,” Ronald Keung, head of Asia Internet Research at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” Friday.
Alibaba missed analysts’ revenue estimates, but revenue rose 2% year on year to hit 208.2 billion Chinese yuan ($29.6 billion).
The tech giant’s domestic commerce unit fell 3% in the first quarter, while the cloud business was down 2% — highlighting concerns that a Chinese consumer spending rebound may not be as strong as expected.
Noting the decline in Alibaba’s shares, Jiong Shao, analyst at Barclays said on Friday, ahead of the weekend’s Group of Seven summit: “I think that there have been some geopolitical concerns … Investors are concerned about potential sort of a sanction against China and against Chinese companies.”
In a joint statement G-7 leaders acknowledged that there’s a need to de-risk and diversify from China — not decouple. They highlighted the need to “address challenges posed by China’s policies and practices” and “counter malign practices, such as illegitimate technology transfer or data disclosure.”
Shawn Yang of Blue Lotus Research Institute said in a report that the firm is “positive on the effect of separate listing and disclosures of several business units.”
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told CNBC that Alibaba’s plan to spin off its Cloud unit was a “no brainer strategic move that we believe adds to the sum of the parts valuation on Baba” and a “step in the right direction for the Alibaba story.”
The regulatory environment for Internet companies appears to be easing and we see Alibaba as the key beneficiary as a China proxy.
Morgan Stanley
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Alibaba Cloud, the computing unit behind the tech firm’s ChatGPT-style product Tongyi Qianwen, is “really the jewel in the crown,” said Shao, who noted that artificial intelligence has the ability to change the way people do things and even humanity.
“The value of Alibaba Cloud could be easily in the north of about $100 billion two, three years down the road,” said Shao.
Still recovering
Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba attributed their financial results to domestic recovery after China’s aggressive zero-Covid policy ended in December — ending strict lockdowns and quarantine measures.
At the company’s first-quarter earnings presentation on Thursday, Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, said: “As Covid-19 cases waned after the Chinese New Year, business and social activities gradually recovered in China. This change had impacted some of our businesses in various degrees.”
Tencent’s chairman and CEO Pony Ma said the company bounced back into double-digit revenue growth as payment volumes and ad spend across most categories benefited from the consumption recovery in China.
Advertising is doing very well, said Barclay’s Shao, noting that Tencent and Baidu both said their ad businesses have been growing double digits year-over-year.
E-commerce is recovering, though not as fast as what the market is hoping for, said both Keung and Shao.
“I think the e-commerce numbers do show some of the recovery on a one-year basis and on a two-year basis, we are seeing some signs of this consumption gradually recovering,” said Keung.
“Travel has been strong and goods kind of started to really pick up in the month of March with apparel.”
Keung said they “expect some attractive pricing to drive demand during the 618 shopping festival.” The 618 shopping festival, which happens on June 18, is one of China’s most important shopping festivals.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.
The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.
The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.
But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.
Seeking CLARITY
The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.
The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.
Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.
“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”
Pushing it to pass
Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.
The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.
Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.
“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”
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The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.
Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.
“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.
GENIUS and the Fed
The House is scheduled for a GENIUS Act vote on Thursday.
The package cleared the Senate last month with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans to support the measure.
The House stood down on their own version of the bill under pressure from Trump, who told lawmakers via a Truth Social post to “Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS.”
In addition to the two major bills the crypto industry has pushed for, the House will take up a separate measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The bill is expected to pass in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.
The commitment includes an initial 100 megawatt data center built in Lancaster, a city about 70 miles west of Philadelphia. The data center will be able to expand to 300 MW.
“The demand for high-performance AI compute is relentless,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator in a release, “and CoreWeave is scaling a cloud purpose-built for AI to meet it and strengthen US leadership.”
The announcement comes as part of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., where President Donald Trump, members of his administration and executives are meeting to discuss AI and investment opportunities in the state.
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Google announced a $25 billion data center and AI infrastructure deal Tuesday in conjunction with the summit, and pledged $3 billion to upgrade two hydropower plants in Pennsylvania.
CoreWeave, which rents out access to Nvidia AI chips, has been on a tear since it went public at the end of March. Shares opened at $39 and are up more than 250% since then.
The company announced a $9 billion acquisition of data center infrastructure provider Core Scientific last week, a deal that will boost CoreWeave’s access to power and real estate.
CoreWeave was already a major customer of Core Scientific and the deal will cut $10 billion in future lease commitments, according to the company.
In this photo illustration, logo of Tesla is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of the Indian flag in Ankara, Turkiye on November 28, 2023.
Cem Genco | Anadolu | Getty Images
Tesla has made its long-awaited debut in India, where it will sell its electric SUV, the Model Y, starting at $69,770, a significant markup from other major markets, its website showed Tuesday.
The sales launch comes the same day the American electric vehicle maker opened a showroom in Mumbai, its first in the country.
Isabel Fan, Southeast Asia Director at Tesla, also announced that the company would soon launch a showroom in the Indian capital of New Delhi, according to a report from CNBC-TV18.
The report added that Tesla would hire staff locally and set up experience centers, service centers, delivery systems, charging stations and logistics hubs throughout the country.
There has long been speculation about when Tesla would enter India, the third-largest automotive market in the world by sales. However, the high price tag may come as a surprise to many. For example, the Model Y starts from $44,990 in the U.S.
Why are prices so high?
Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer, in April, confirmed the company’s interest in India but said it would take a careful approach to the market considering its 70% tariff on EV imports and about 30% luxury tax.
These high taxes explain why Tesla was forced to set its prices so high in India, despite the country’s preference for EVs at much lower price ranges.
Experts told CNBC that this will see Tesla in India compete in the premium segment of the market with the likes of BMW, rather than with local EV companies like Tata Motors.
“I won’t say that these prices are completely out of range because you will find buyers in India for all price points,” Vivek Vaidya, global client leader for mobility at research firm Frost & Sullivan, told CNBC’s “Inside India” on Tuesday.
“The question is whether they are going to threaten the mass market. The answer to that is no because the most popular selling cars probably sell at one-tenth of this price,” he added.
Testing the waters
While the Model Y will struggle to be price competitive, Tesla is likely more focused on “testing the waters” than generating sales in India, Puneet Gupta, Director for the Indian automotive market at S&P Global Mobility, told CNBC.
India first announced a new EV policy last year that promised to reduce duties for companies that commit to building up a local supply chain. While this could help Tesla push its prices down, the company has yet to commit to building any local manufacturing plants in India.
“The Mumbai showroom is a strategic ‘soft power’ move, not a full commitment,” Diwakar Murugan, automotives analyst at Canalys, told CNBC in a statement, adding that Tesla’s hesitation in India is pragmatic, as the market still lacks the demand to justify a large-scale manufacturing facility.
“Shifting a significant portion of its production to India would require a major re-evaluation of its global manufacturing strategy, something it’s not ready to do while its primary focus remains on scaling production in its established markets,” he said.
Murugan predicted that Tesla may only commit to full-scale Indian manufacturing between 2028 and 2030, with incentives like land subsidies and tax holidays, as well as the maturity of the local battery market expected to be important factors.
In the meantime, the Model Y will be a “niche, limited-volume product for wealthy, tech-savvy early adopters who seek a status symbol,” he added.
S&P’s Gupta noted that India’s tariffs on EV exports could also soon change as a result of ongoing trade negotiations between Washington and New Delhi, as well as further tweaks to its EV policy.
“The Indian government has been very proactive in terms of pushing green, cleaner, electric cars, and I think that Tesla has a clear advantage due to the India-U.S. relationship,” Gupta said.