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Alice Ye

Senior editor with 15 years in news and financial media. Covers China's AI, electric vehicles, and robotics, with a focus on industry trends, technological innovation, and capital markets.

Luckin Coffee's Retail Pivot: Why China's Biggest Coffee Chain Is Fighting for Shelf Space

What Is Luckin's "Portable Coffee" Strategy? Luckin Coffee built its brand on one thing: cheap, fast, app-ordered fresh-brewed coffee sold through a dense network of small-format stores. But since 2024, the company has been quietly building a parallel business — selling coffee in formats

JD.com Returns to Operating Profit, But Revenue Decline Exposes Structural Growth Gap

JD.com delivered a rare divergence in its second-quarter 2026 results: operating profit flipped from a RMB 900 million (US$125 million) loss to a RMB 4.5 billion (US$625 million) gain, even as revenue contracted 2.9% year-on-year to RMB 346.4 billion (US$48.

Leapmotor's Margin Collapse Exposes the Fatal Flaw in China's EV Price War

Leapmotor has built China's most aggressive EV pricing machine — but its first-quarter 2026 results reveal that selling more cars is now costing it money with every unit shipped. The Hangzhou-based automaker reported a Q1 2026 net loss attributable to shareholders of RMB 390 million (US$54.

Honor's Robot Phone Sells Out in Hours as China's Smartphone War Turns Robotic

Honor launched the world's first robotics-grade smartphone on August 12, 2026, priced from RMB 9,999 (US$1,389), and watched pre-sale inventory evaporate within hours — a debut that redraws the competitive boundary between consumer electronics and embodied AI hardware. The sell-out, observed simultaneously across

ChinaBiz Briefing | Alibaba Supernode, Nvidia Squeeze, BYD Flash Charging

China's technology and industrial sectors delivered a dense cluster of structural signals on August 12, with developments spanning AI compute infrastructure, semiconductor market share, model economics, EV hardware, and robotics capital markets. Taken together, the day's news maps the contours of a single overarching shift: China&

Why DeepSeek Is Raising Prices While OpenAI Cuts Them

What Is Happening? Something unusual is unfolding in the global AI model market: the pricing curves for American and Chinese large language models are moving in opposite directions. On one side, OpenAI slashed prices on its GPT-5.6 Luna tier by 80% in late July 2026, and Anthropic quietly

Why SERES Stock Has Fallen Two-Thirds Despite Record EV Sales

What the collapse in SERES Group's share price reveals about the structural economics of China's premium EV market What Is SERES, and Why Does Its Stock Decline Matter? SERES Group is a Chongqing-based automaker best known as the manufacturing partner behind the AITO brand of

Apple Turns to CXMT as AI Memory Crunch Reshapes the Global DRAM Market

Apple is evaluating DRAM chips from Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for use in iPhones and MacBooks, a move that would mark the first time the Cupertino company has sourced memory from a Chinese supplier — and signals how severely the AI compute boom has distorted the global semiconductor supply chain. The

China’s First Humanoid Robot IPO: How Unitree Built a DJI-Style Cost Advantage

Unitree Robotics opened for public subscription on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market on August 10, 2026, marking the debut of China's first listed humanoid robot pure-play — and triggering a wave of reassessment among global investors who had long underestimated the Hangzhou-based company'

ChinaBiz Briefing | ByteDance Upgrades Seedance, MiniMax Open-Sources H3, Xiaomi Starts SUV Price War, Unitree Advances IPO

China’s tech champions are converging on a common priority: turning headline-grabbing innovation into production-ready products—and funding the scale-up. In AI, video generation is moving from flashy demos to controllable, editable workflows that fit enterprise budgets. In EVs, Xiaomi is forcing a new pricing benchmark that