Chinese fintech major Ant Group is looking to boost its global presence via its digital offering, Alipay+, as it seeks to connect mobile payment apps around the world.
“What we found is that people want to use their home e-wallets when they travel abroad. So they don’t want to have to load their card into another app that they don’t know as well,” Douglas Feagin, senior vice president of Ant Group, an affiliate of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, told CNBC.
The group’s global arm, Ant International, introduced Alipay+ in 2020, allowing foreigners to use apps from their home countries to make payments in China by scanning QR codes of Alipay – Ant Group’s largely domestically-focused platform – and in other countries via local partners.
“We see a huge opportunity for expansion and the relatively broad coverage we have in Asia – we [would] like to replicate in places like Middle East, Latam and Europe,” said Feagin. “People from all these regions are going to other regions, so a big opportunity to expand.”
Ant had invested in country-specific e-wallets across Asia, but the CEOs wanted to take their products overseas, said Feagin, also president of Ant International.
The company had some cross-border tourism business from customers traveling outside of China, said Feagin, but that was “mostly focused on where the Chinese tourists go.” Ant had entered Europe and the U.S., where Chinese tourism was booming before the Covid-19 pandemic, through Alipay.
Ant with its Alipay+ offering seeks to make the most of the early inroads into those markets.
“We had the benefit that Alipay was already accepted in many merchants around the world so one of our first steps was [to] convert those merchants to Alipay+ merchants. So instead of just accepting a wallet, they can accept many wallets,” said Feagin.
Alipay+ now connects 88 million merchants in 57 countries and regions to 1.5 billion consumer accounts across more than 25 e-wallets and bank apps, according to Ant.
“Ant Group’s early vision for global expansion was centered on Southeast Asia. The company took strategic stakes in e-wallets in every major Southeast Asian economy,” Zennon Kapron, founder and director of consultancy Kapronasia, said in a January report.
Ant is also expanding into emerging markets such as Sri Lanka as well as Cambodia. The firm has also expanded into Europe and Middle East, partnering with European e-wallets Tinaba in July last year and Nexi in February as well as Dubai Duty Free in the Middle East at the start of this year.
There are also growth opportunities in the firm’s established markets like Singapore and South Korea, for instance a lot of people use mobile payments in China, but still far fewer compared with people in other countries, said Feagin.
“There’s huge room to grow. I think a lot of people just think of using traditional payment methods when they go abroad.”
“When you think about the big markets that receive a lot of tourists, like Thailand and Japan, the chances for payment from mobile apps to grow are enormous.”
From problems to solutions
“Following restructuring mandated by China’s regulators that occurred concurrently with various geopolitical tensions that impacted its ability to expand in certain markets, Ant modified its global expansion strategy. The result was Alipay+ which aims to resolve interoperability hiccups for e-wallets,” said Kapron.
The firm first targeted countries with large populations to rapidly expand its user base, said Feagin. It also looked at key tourism destinations such as Japan, Thailand and Singapore.
“These are big markets for people wanting to come and visit and so we focused a lot on building out their merchant coverage there,” said Feagin.
And now it doubling down on its global expansion, with its eye on the European, Latin American and Middle East markets.
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.
Shares of Intuit popped about 9% on Friday, a day after the company reported quarterly results that beat analysts’ estimates and issued rosy guidance for the full year.
Intuit, which is best known for its TurboTax and QuickBooks software, said revenue in the fiscal third quarter increased 15% to $7.8 billion. Net income rose 18% to $2.82 billion, or $10.02 per share, from $2.39 billion, or $8.42 per share, a year earlier.
“This is the fastest organic growth that we have had in over a decade,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Thursday. “It’s really incredible growth across the platform.”
For its full fiscal year, Intuit said it expects to report revenue of $18.72 billion to $18.76 billion, up from the range of $18.16 billion to $18.35 billion it shared last quarter. Analysts were expecting $18.35 billion, according to LSEG.
“We’re redefining what’s possible with [artificial intelligence] by becoming a one-stop shop of AI-agents and AI-enabled human experts to fuel the success of consumers and small and mid-market businesses,” Goodarzi said in a release Thursday.
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Goldman Sachs analysts reiterated their buy rating on the stock and raised their price target to $860 from $750 on Thursday. The analysts said Intuit’s execution across its core growth pillars is “reinforcing confidence” in its growth profile over the long term.
The company’s AI roadmap, which includes the introduction of AI agents, will add additional upside, the analysts added.
“In our view, Intuit stands out as a rare asset straddling both consumer and business ecosystems, all while supplemented by AI-prioritization,” the Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank also reiterated their buy rating on the stock and raised their price target to $815 from $750.
They said the company’s results were “reassuring” after a rocky two years and that they feel more confident about its ability to grow the consumer business.
“Longer term, we continue to believe Intuit presents a unique investment opportunity and we see its platform approach powering accelerated innovation with leverage, thus enabling sustained mid-teens or better EPS growth,” the analysts wrote in a Friday note.
FILE PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook escorts U.S. President Donald Trump as he tours Apple’s Mac Pro manufacturing plant with in Austin, Texas, U.S., November 20, 2019.
Last week, Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook,” and on Friday, he threatened to slap a 25% tariff on iPhones in a social media post.
Trump is upset with Apple’s plan to source the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. from its factory partners in India, instead of China. Cook officially confirmed this plan earlier this month during earnings.
Trump wants Apple to build iPhones for the U.S. market in the U.S. and has continued to pressure the company and Cook.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday.
Analysts said it would probably make more sense for Apple to eat the cost rather than move production stateside.
“In terms of profitability, it’s way better for Apple to take the hit of a 25% tariff on iPhones sold in the US market than to move iPhone assembly lines back to US,” wrote Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on X.
UBS analyst David Vogt said that the potential 25% tariffs were a “jarring headline,” but that they would only be a “modest headwind” to Apple’s earnings, dropping annual earnings by 51 cents per share, versus a prior expectation of 34 cents per share under the current tariff landscape.
Experts have long held that a U.S.-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.
Analysts have said that made in U.S.A. iPhones would be much more expensive, CNBC previously reported, with some estimates ranging between $1,500 to $3,500 to buy one at retail. Labor costs would certainly rise.
But it would also be logistically complicated.
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Supply chains and factories take years to build out, including installing equipment and staffing up. Parts that Apple imported to the United States for assembly might be subject to tariffs as well.
Apple started manufacturing iPhones in India in 2017 but it was only in recent years that the region was capable of building Apple’s latest devices.
“We believe the concept of Apple producing iPhones in the US is a fairy tale that is not feasible,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a note on Friday.
Other analysts were wary about predicting how Trump’s threat ultimately plays out. Apple might be able to strike a deal with the administration — despite the eroding relationship — or challenge the tariffs in court.
For now, most of Apple’s most important products are exempt from tariffs after Trump gave phones and computers a tariff waiver — even from China — in April, but Apple doesn’t know how the Trump administration’s tariffs will ultimately play out beyond June.
“We’re skeptical,” that the 25% tariff will materialize, wrote Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers.
He wrote that Apple could try to preserve its roughly 41% gross margin on iPhones by raising prices in the U.S. by between $100 or $300 per phone.
It’s unclear how Trump intends to target Apple’s India-made iPhones. Rakers wrote that the administration could put specific tariffs on phone imports from India.
Apple’s operations in India continue to expand.
Foxconn, which assembles iPhones for Apple, is building a new $1.5 billion factory in India that could do some iPhone production, the Financial Times reported Thursday.