Hi folks, we are back with our weekly edition of China’s Digital Digest, wherein we bring you weekly updates on China’s digital space. The report takes a quick glance at China’s complex and rapidly evolving social media landscape by providing updates on the latest happenings across the social media industry. Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. Alibaba.Com Targets 100% AI Adoption by Merchants in 2025
Alibaba Group Holding’s international wholesale marketplace, Alibaba.com, expects all sellers on the platform to adopt its artificial intelligence (AI) tools by the end of this year, as the e-commerce giant boosts its investment in the technology.
More than half of the roughly 200,000 merchants on Alibaba.com were already using its AI applications on a weekly basis. Introduced in early 2024, these AI tools are designed to assist sellers in marketing, product management, customer engagement and risk control – which form part of efforts to expand Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce business.
2. Food Delivery Platform Deliveroo to Exit Hong Kong Market in April
On-demand food delivery platform Deliveroo will exit the Hong Kong market next month through a sale of certain assets to rival Foodpanda amid punishing competition.
Deliveroo said that it had nominated liquidators Cosimo Borrelli and Jocelyn Chi from Kroll, a financial and risk advisory firm, to manage closure of the business and the remainder of its assets “in the most efficient way possible”. Deliveroo Hong Kong’s service will end on April 7, bringing a nine-year run in the market to a close. The development comes less than two years after mainland Chinese rival Meituan’s Keeta entered Hong Kong and obtained significant market share.
3. ByteDance Releases Technical Report on Seedream 2.0 Text-to-Image Model
ByteDance’s Douyin AI team has published a technical report on their Seedream 2.0 text-to-image generation model, revealing comprehensive technical details for the first time.
The report covers the entire development process including data construction, pre-training frameworks, and post-training RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), with detailed explanations of how the model achieves native Chinese-English bilingual understanding, text rendering, high aesthetic quality, and resolution adaptability. According to the report, Seedream 2.0 was launched in December 2024 on the Douyin app and Jimeng platform, serving hundreds of millions of users and becoming the preferred model for many professional designers in China.
4. ByteDance Denies the Rumor of Placing a 1 Billion Yuan Order with Cambricon
A ByteDance representative has denied media reports that the company has placed a 1 billion Yuan order with Cambricon. On March 10th, the stock price of Cambricon surged in the afternoon, rising more than 5% at one point. There were market reports that ByteDance placed an order with Cambricon for 40,000 units of the 580 chip at a unit price of 25,000 yuan, totaling a value of 1 billion yuan.
Established in 2016, Cambricon focuses on research and technological innovation in artificial intelligence chip products. They provide a series of intelligent chip products with unified ecology and platform-based foundational system software emphasizing cloud-edge-end integration and hardware-software collaboration for training inference fusion.
5. Manus Reaches Strategic Cooperation with the Alibaba Tongyi Qwen Team
Manus has announced that it has officially reached a strategic cooperation with the Alibaba Tongyi Qwen team. Both parties will implement all functions of Manus on domestic models and computing power platforms based on the open-source models of Tongyi Qwen series.
At present, the two technical teams have begun close cooperation, dedicated to creating more creative general intelligent body products for Chinese users. Manus is the first AI Agent product released by the startup company Monica, and it has recently become popular on social media.
6. Manus Development Team Monica Completes A New Round of Financing, Led by Tencent
The ‘Internet celebrity’ product Manus’s parent company Monica has completed a new round of financing led by Tencent.
Tencent had been discussing investment with Monica’s team last year, and now the entire investment has been completed. This is Tencent‘s second collaboration with Monica’s founder Xiao Hong. Previously, their first entrepreneurial project, Weiban Assistant, also received investment from Tencent. In addition, there are reports that ByteDance offered $30 million to acquire Monica in 2024. However, negotiations fell through because Monica believed the price was not fair enough.
7. Xiaohongshu Announces Global E-commerce Expansion, Now Covering the US Market
Chinese lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu (rednote) has announced its “Overseas E-commerce Pioneer Program,” designed as a comprehensive cross-border solution for merchants.
The program integrates online transactions, export trade, cross-border payments, and localized operations into a full-service chain to help businesses reach global users. Upon joining as an overseas merchant, sellers can showcase their products across multiple channels including posts, livestreams, and stores within Xiaohongshu’s content ecosystem.
8. AI Video Startup Avolution.ai Will Be Acquired by MiniMax
Exclusive information obtained from multiple insiders reveals that the AI video startup ‘Avolution.ai’ will be acquired by MiniMax. The two parties have already finalized the acquisition intention, and the related process is still ongoing. As of the time of publication, MiniMax has not yet responded.
In 2024, when Avolution.ai was in the angel investing stage, its valuation did not exceed $20 million USD, approximately around 100 million RMB. Insiders said that since last year, Avolution.ai has been continuously seeking a second round of financing but it has not been smooth. The team itself has some experience in the field of AI video technology and ultimately chose to cooperate with MiniMax for mutual benefit.
Wrapping Up
The vast and diverse nature of the Chinese Social Media space makes it incredibly challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments taking place. However, China’s Digital Digest brings you all the latest updates from there to keep you abreast of all the evolving trends.
To delve deeper into the findings of our latest report, click here.
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