China's Xi meets Zuckerberg, Cook in Beijing

Apple's Tim Cook and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, state media said Tuesday, as the Communist Party pushes for a larger role in private firms.

The meeting came days after Xi secured his position as China's most powerful leader since Mao and as Facebook seeks to gain entry to the massive market.

"As a beneficiary of and contributor to economic globalisation, China's development is the opportunity for the world," Xi told the annual gathering of advisers to Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Under Xi, the Communist Party has increasingly tightened its grip on state-owned companies and has asked foreign firms to include party cells in their offices.

The move has raised concerns that the party may try to create alternative power structures within companies and potentially exercise control over management decisions, as it has in the case of state-owned enterprises.

Of the more than one hundred thousand foreign-funded companies in China, 70 percent had set up party organisations by the end of 2016, according to Qi Yu, deputy head of the party's Organisation Department.

Foreign companies regularly complain about the lack of access to Chinese markets and Zuckerberg in particular has made a big show of courting the country's top leadership in hopes of convincing Beijing to relax its ban on Facebook.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneur has been photographed with a collection of Xi's writings and happily jogging across Tiananmen Square in choking pollution. He has also given a lecture in China in halting Chinese.

The company has recently begun staffing up on the mainland, but appears to have made little progress in convincing Beijing to change its mind, a prospect that seems even less likely as the country tightens social media controls.

Tsinghua University's business school has attracted a bevy of A-list advisers from the worlds of tech and finance, including Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, and Tesla's Elon Musk, as well as China's own leading entrepreneurs, such as Alibaba's Jack Ma.

Apple Q3 iPhone shipments surge 40 pct in China: survey
Shanghai (AFP) Oct 30, 2017 - Apple has ended an 18-month slump in iPhone sales in China with a 40 percent surge in shipments in the third quarter, according to a private survey released Monday.

About 11 million iPhones were sold in China from July to September compared to eight million in the same period last year, research firm Canalys said in a report.

Apple had negative year-on-year growth in China for the previous six quarters.

The uptick in deliveries came even though the country's overall market declined five percent in the same quarter.

"The high sell-in caters to the pent-up demand of iPhone upgraders in the absence of the iPhone X," said Canalys analyst Mo Jia, adding that price cuts on earlier models after the announcement of the iPhone 8 also helped.

But Apple's iPhone shipments still lag far behind domestic rivals, with the company ranked only fifth on the mainland behind Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

Third-quarter growth was only temporary, according to Mo, predicting that Apple was unlikely to sustain such momentum in Q4.

Apple will launch the iPhone X early next month. Excitement is already building in China, with investors snapping up pre-orders just minutes after they became available last week.

"The iPhone X will enjoy a healthy grey market status, but its popularity is unlikely to help Apple in the short term," sad Mo.

China was once Apple's biggest overseas market outside the Americas, but it was overtaken by the European market last year, according to the company's earnings report.

Amazon shares soar as earnings top expectations
San Francisco (AFP) Oct 27, 2017
Amazon shares soared Thursday after the Internet giant reported earnings that topped expectations, boosting revenue from its fresh acquisition of grocery chain Whole Foods and an expanded line-up of devices tapping into its digital assistant Alexa. Profit for the third quarter was $256 million, up slightly from $252 million a year ago while revenue jumped 34 percent to $43.7 billion. The ... read more

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