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We update you on the most essential news from Asia in tech, media, and business—the things you need to know that you probably haven’t heard in Western media.
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Chinese Real Estate Company Beike to Raise $2 Billion in US IPO 🏘
Beike Zhaofang is a Chinese online property platform backed by Tencent and Soft Bank that was last valued at $10 Billion. The company was launched by one of China’s biggest real estate companies Lianjia as an online property brokerage platform. Last Friday, they made a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $2 Billion in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. This would be the largest Chinese IPO in the US since iQiyi raised $2.4 Billion in March 2018.
Over the last few months, several Chinese tech companies (JD, Netease, Ctrip, etc.) have chosen the opposite path. They have either delisted from US stock exchanges or chosen to list in Hong Kong instead. While the US government still continues to pose financial restrictions on both individual Chinese companies and Chinese firms more broadly, Beike is accepting these risks while some of their peers are not.
The Thousands of Newly Banned YouTube Accounts 🚫
YouTube announced last week that they have banned thousands of Chinese accounts on their platform for engaging in “coordinated political influence” on political issues. For more detail on the scale of the ban, 2,596 Chinese accounts were taken down in Q2 of this year versus 277 in Q1. Google’s message came from their publicly available Threat Analysis Group Bulletin.
This news implies that there is a significant increase in pro-Chinese spam and propaganda on YouTube. The research firm Graphika posted a full report outlining their analysis on the proliferation of pro-Chinese spam across not only YouTube, but other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Even outside of purely China-related spam, Google has reported a uniquely busy year for taking down threatening political channels. Whoever is behind content we see on social media, there are many people who would benefit from enhancing the tensions between the US and China on platforms like YouTube.
An Indian Hypergrowth Startup Story = WhiteHat Jr. 🚀
WhiteHat Jr. is an Indian edtech startup founded 18 months ago that offers online coding classes for students in India and the US. Another Indian ed tech firm Byju just acquired WhiteHat Jr. for $300 Million, which makes WhiteHat Jr. the fastest, largest startup exit story in Indian history. The company hosts live online coding classes that assign one teacher to each student and cost around $10 per class.
This is a wonderful success story for India’s tech ecosystem. One of the most important parts of building a startup ecosystem is having successful exits, which increases the startup community’s number of role models, strengthens psychological belief, and theoretically allows ‘alumni’ from those startups to invest in the next generation of founders. And to double down on the specific vertical, ed tech is a very hot space right now given the move to virtual/remote education because coronavirus. It’s estimated that 250 Million students in India have had their schooling disrupted over the last few months. Byju has raised $400 Million this year and other Indian competitors like Unacademy and Vedantu have received similarly large recent funding rounds.
Update #46 - Beike Lists, Banned YouTubers, and Indian Ed Tech