The Great Firechat

After a several month hiatus Adeh and Kevin are back with season 2!

This week we delve deep into ElonMusk's Twit-tastrophe and examine the odds of his success, and the success of other superapps. Then we segue to the China gaming market which is finally on the thaw.

1) Twitter to Superapp - What Musk needs to do to turn it into a Superapp, and can he do it?

Douyin making smart Superapp plays

2) Gaming:

Blizzard and Netease end partnership after 15 years

Tencent gets first gaming license after freeze

Tencent to expand Honor of the Kings into it's own metaverse

Today we chat with Duco van Breemen.

Just looking at what Duco has done – starts his first company (of many) at 11 years old, spends a decade in China doing government relations and supporting start-ups, moves to Australia and becomes CEO of a major coworking space and incubator in the heart of Sydney's Chinatown, then ends up doing one of the biggest NFT events in the country – the guy sounds like a business monster.

But listening to him, I think you'll find him quite human and humble. 

Enjoy!

Links:

• Duco is CEO of Haymarket HQ https://www.haymarkethq.com/
• Duco's brilliant and hilarious NFT project "The Kimmies" https://www.thekimmies.com/
• Duco's co-organized event with Aussie street artist E.L.K. https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/events/edge-of-chaos

Adeh and Kevin sit down with Robby Wade, CEO and Co-founder of Thisapp, "an all-in-one chat platform that makes it easy to connect with anyone and organize anything". We explore everything superapps from their success factors, determining their viability in the West to Elon Musk pulling out of the Twitter deal.

Claim your Thisapp username at https://www.thisapp.com/

"The First Superapp" book: https://www.kevinshimota.com/

This week we are all about how to front-run the opportunity:

Bytedance is making an Instagram copy in China to compete with RED, but does the West need a RED copy?

With a mess of review platforms in the West, we think it’s time for a review revolution!

Didi's year-long data debacle seems to finally be at an end with one big last fine. Chinese gaming companies increasingly look overseas, while Chinese look for new ways to play games, like LARPing, which has apparently become big enough to cause some problems. Enjoy!

1) Bytedance to launch KeSong 可颂 'criossant' - Instagram-copy to compete with Xiaohongshu in China

2) The jury is out - Didi fined USD 1Billion

3) Netease opens new gaming studio in Seattle focused on first-person narrative action 

4) China’s Communist Party cracks down on larping

5) Kevin explains Suprapps to the Wall Street Journal

BONUS

• translation of a chinese article on the birth of Douyin/TikTok
• Original Article in Chinese 

Write-up:

This week we talk about China's big tech to give NFTs a new name in a tech rebranding to attempt to revitalize the industry in the gov's eyes, which is needed because companies like Alibaba are suffering small but telling 'burns' from the government. China's livestreaming could use some rethinking as they're hit with more content restrictions and Tencent closes their "WeGame" mobile app showing a failure to consolidate their gaming empire in China.

1) China tech is rebranding NFTs

2) Alibaba gets a 'sick burn' from Hangzhou metro

3) China's livestreaming is now 'wholesome-content only'

4) Tencent closes "WeGame", a Steam-like mobile game portal

BONUS Article: Inside Didi's 60 billion dollar crash by Bloomberg

Bit of a monstruous episode this week, we normally try to stick to 4 stories, and we ended up going into about 10. We chat out the electric vehicle market, examine data security concerns from the national and corporate level, get an update from gaming criss-crossing the Pacific, and lastly, provide you with an authentic China-experience by selling you a product while teaching you Chinese - I dub this 'educational informercials' and I think we're just seeing the beginning of this new China-fad.

1) BYD becomes third-largest car company by market cap

2) After a year of probing, Didi is back online

3) speaking of probing for data security, Tiktok 'lied' about user data (or did they?) ; and an NYT article on the same topic.

3.5) Bytedance's foray into VR ; and Tencent opens a BD on 'extended reality'

4）Tencent and Netease bring games to Msft's Xbox ; and, after another freeze, Beijing is approving more games

(4.5) speaking of Tencent, they invested $250mn in Flipkart (indian eCommerce)

5) New Oriental finds surprising success by innovatively combining eCommerce livestreaming and English education - or what I dub, "the educational infomercial"

Bonus: Elon Musk holds town hall meeting with 5k Twitter employees and says he wants to turn Twitter into WeChat-style superapp

This week we delve into ecommerce boom of short-video apps in China Douyin and Kuaishou then look at how ecommerce is and will evolve outside of China. Can Facebook and Instagram create a similar ecommerce pivot with their social media platforms?

Meanwhile, India is creating a new centralized digital commerce platform, which accomplishes something similar to China's recent regulation on the fintech: creating a level playing field and breaking down monopolistic barriers in the digital realm.

1) Douyin’s ecommerce sales more than tripled over the past year 

2) Alibaba-backed smart-vending machine Ubox to IPO in HK 

3) Apple moving more production to Vietnam 

4) India making ecommerce a public good with Open Network for Digital Commerce 

5) SouthEast Asia Tech is cooling off 

Honorable mentions: www.stratechery.com by Ben Thompson

This week we delve into the big slowdown of Tencent, and greather big tech in China, and look at how these companies are looking overseas markets for revenue potential, especially in games.

We then talk a bit about WeChat; "private traffic" is a major trend in China driving business decision and it pairs with influencer and live-streaming economy yet it's not well understood outside of China. Similarly, Elon Musk in an interview this week, explains that WeChat is "really an excellent app" and his Twitter product road map would be to make a WeChat-style superapp.

1) Tencent stops growing, down $500bn since 2021 peak  

2) Chinese mobile game companies set eyes on US, Europe and overseas markets

3) "Private traffic" trend in China 私域流量

4) Elon Musk wants the West to make a WeChat-style Superapp

Bonus article: Wired on Shein

This week Adeh and Kevin team up with Fabian Gems and Lisa-Maria Stöger from GIN (Global Incubator Network) as we chat about the metaverse, how China's metaverse will look similar and different from the rest of the world, and a few fun digressions. Enjoy!

(no cool links to sources this week as this was more a live, adlib convo)

With Elon Musk acquiring Twitter and upending the status quo of the Western tech, Kevin and Adeh analyze and foretell the impact of the EU's two new upcoming tech regulation policies by examining China's tech crackdown as precedence.

They end on a more optimistic note by looking at how parts of China's tech is continuuing to flourish and the crackdown beginning to ease.

1) Musk bought Twitter, a $44 bn deal

2) EU tech crackdown: EU approves Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act

3) China tech crackdown: $1 tn tech stock value loss during crackdown, venture cap funding down 77% yoy

4) Shein valued at $100 bn USD, more than H&M and Zara combined

5) China hands out game licenses after 9 month freeze  

5b) Tencent didn't get a license but still rolling in the dough