Chinese EV Unicorn WM Motor Founder Freeman Shen Speaks To China Money Network

Zhifei Li, founder and CEO of Chinese artificial intelligence company Mobvoi, speaks to China Money Network's Nina Xiang on how he led his company, backed by Google and Sequoia Capital China and other investors, to the smart hardware sector from initially trying to build a voice interaction mobile app. He also talks about his belief on where the future will be for the Internet-of-Things sector, smart devices, and how to compete with tech giants including Xiaomi and others.

TiENPAY is not your average fintech start-up. With the company's origin dating back to the first mobile wallet launched in Australia in 1996, the Hong Kong-based firm has a grand dream: to become the number one global mobile wallet clearance and settlement platform.

Founded by Singaporean entrepreneur and finance veteran William Tien, the company integrates a mobile wallet app, a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) currency exchange (with Bitcoin and other cryto-currency capabilities), and a digital asset pool that includes intellectual property rights of dozens of web films it plans to produce.

At the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions (also known as the Summer Davos) in Dalian last week, China Money Network caught up with Prof. Xiaodong Lee, former president and CEO of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), to chat about the development of the Internet industry in China and the country's role in managing the world wide web.

Millions of ambitious young people wake up each morning wanting to "change the world," but few have as ambitious a goal as Bill Liu, founder of Chinese flexible display company Royole Corporation. If Thomas Friedman argued that "the world is flat," then Bill Liu's mission is to bend, curve and roll up that world.

In this episode of China Money Podcast, guest Jie Gong, a partner at Pantheon’s Asia Investment Team, spoke to our host Nina Xiang. Gong discussed new and important trends she sees in China's private equity and venture capital space, and what the fund-of-funds manager looks for when considering backing funds in China.

To say that Meng Xing, V.P. and entrepreneur-in-residence at Chinese venture firm Shunwei Capital has been busy would be an gross understatement.

Over the past ten years, the 31-year-old venture capitalist and entrepreneur has founded two artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups, selling one, an image recognition AI company, to Amazon and the other to a listed Chinese company. In between, he worked as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan Hong Kong and casino giant Caesars Entertainment, on top of getting an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT...

James Zhou, founder of China's biggest robot maker Ubtech Robotics, was fascinated by the Transformers movie as a young boy in Shanghai during the 1980s. A few decades later in Shenzhen, he built Ubtech from a personal interest project to a US$5 billion technology juggernaut.

He is dreaming even bigger for the future. By his estimation, Ubtech will become the global leader of the consumer robotics market, as the sector expands rapidly to make robots enter average households just like cars did a hundred years ago.

Hamilton Tang, managing partner of Chinese private equity firm SMC Capital China, is betting on horses, or more importantly, the growing number of wealthy Chinese who own, ride and race them.

In 2012, SMC invested RMB22 million (US$3 million) in Rider Horse Co., Ltd, a Chinese company specializing in horse trading, breeding, managing horse clubs and horse races. Since then, the company has increased revenues by more than six times, driven by aspirational consumers mimicking the lifestyle of the elite of the U.K. or Europe.

A national ban on horse race betting in 2000 did not stop Chinese consumers' love for horses. To meet growing demand from aspiring Chinese consumers engaged in horse riding and playing polo, the company imports a couple of hundred horses each year, including New Zealand thoroughbreds.

There are 102 companies that have raised financing a a lower valuation than their previous price tag globally since 2015, according to CB Insights. Only a few on that list are from China, a phenomenon that will not last long as more Chinese tech firms are forced to raise down rounds this year, says Tommy Yip, managing partner at US$210 million-under-management Unicorn Capital Partners.

The founder of Hong Kong-based fund-of-funds manager sees companies, especially those O2O (online-to-offline) and P2P (peer-to-peer) start-ups that raised massive series B and C rounds at extremely high valuations, may be forced to raise money at reduced price in order to survive.

"I think for companies like Didi Chuxing, they have pressure from existing investors to go public sooner. But if you look at the capital market, it’s not a great time for companies like Didi to go public because an IPO today means a down round from a valuation stand point," Yip told me during an interview on the sidelines of the HKVCA Asia Private Equity Forum 2017 in Hong Kong.