Latest news with #JackMa-backed
Business Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Times
OCBC partners Ant International to offer embedded finance to Indonesia SMEs
[SINGAPORE] OCBC has partnered digital payment, digitisation and financial technology provider Ant International to provide embedded financial services to small and medium-sized (SMEs) enterprises in Indonesia. The collaboration is set to benefit thousands of SMEs in Indonesia over the next few years, said OCBC and the Jack Ma-backed Ant Group spin-off in a statement on Wednesday (Jun 4). 'This is part of a joint effort to boost financial inclusion for businesses operating in one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing digital economies in South-east Asia,' said OCBC. The partnership taps the bank's long-standing presence and deep knowledge of SMEs and customer franchise in Indonesia, as well as Ant International's capabilities in alternative data modelling, dynamic credit strategy and automated credit decision. Said Linus Goh, OCBC head of global commercial banking: 'We believe this collaboration will help us to shape the future landscape of financial services in an increasingly digital marketplace in Indonesia, and importantly, to help us enable the aspirations and growth of our SME customers.' Ant International general manager of credit services Quan Tu said the partnership with OCBC 'highlights our shared commitment to deliver tech-infused innovation that empowers business growth and support Indonesia's sustainable future'.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ant Group Global Unit Brings in $3 Billion Ahead of Spinoff
(Bloomberg) -- Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co.'s international division generated nearly $3 billion in revenue for 2024, according to people familiar with the matter, setting the stage for a spinoff after the unit set up its own board last year. America, 'Nation of Porches' Maryland's Credit Rating Gets Downgraded as Governor Blames Trump NJ Transit Train Engineers Strike, Disrupting Travel to NYC NYC Commuters Brace for Chaos as NJ Transit Strike Looms Illinois Cuts Revenue Outlook on Economic, Federal-Funding Woes Ant International, which is headquartered in Singapore, has also produced two consecutive years of adjusted profit, the people said, requesting not to be named because the information isn't public. It isn't clear how the company calculates its adjusted Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but the metric typically strips out non-recurring costs, restructuring charges and other items. The group as a whole grew profits by 61% in 2024 to 38.3 billion yuan ($5.3 billion), according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings from its affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Its latest revenue was not disclosed. Hangzhou-based Ant owns Alipay, a widely used digital payments app and financial services provider in China. Ant Group didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Ant International has been making inroads into Southeast Asia and expanding its business scope. It's been a key unit for Ant Group, which has been trying to bolster revenue growth by investing heavily into artificial intelligence and overseas. Ant International's IPO Valuation May Be $8-$24 Billion: React The global unit could fetch an initial public offering valuation of anywhere between $8 billion to $24 billion if it were to list in Hong Kong, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Francis Chan and Sharnie Wong said in a note earlier this month. They based that on the assumption that Ant International's profit share is 20% of the entire group, which is estimated to be worth $40 billion to $119 billion. The international arm initially catered to Chinese tourists traveling outside the country by enabling them to use Alipay to make payments abroad. That service has since expanded into a backbone for cross-border payments known as Alipay+ that can be used by other digital wallets. For example, when customers of GCash from the Philippines travel to South Korea, they can make payments with their regular app when they see the Alipay+ logo displayed at merchants. Alipay+ currently connects 1.7 billion user accounts across 36 digital wallets. Ant International has three other core businesses: Antom offers payment solutions for merchants, WorldFirst enables cross-border trade payment, and Embedded Finance has an AI-powered digital lending service and helps clients with treasury and foreign exchange management. The unit is overseen by Chairman Eric Jing, who is also chairman of Ant Group. Yang Peng is the CEO of Ant International. Ant Group has made changes to its overall business strategy since Chinese regulators forced it to scrap its blockbuster initial public offering in 2020. In 2023, the company proposed buying back as much as 7.6% of its shares under a repurchase plan that took Ant's valuation down to about $79 billion at the time — well off its peak of $280 billion prior to its aborted listing. Ant overhauled its structure last year and set up independent boards for three of its units including the international division, OceanBase, and Ant Digital Technologies. The overall group would explore going public in Hong Kong first instead of a dual Shanghai-Hong Kong listing like what it tried earlier, people familiar said in 2023. (Updates with analyst estimate on Ant's valuation. An earlier version corrected Eric Jing's title in the 10th paragraph.) Why Apple Still Hasn't Cracked AI Microsoft's CEO on How AI Will Remake Every Company, Including His Cartoon Network's Last Gasp DeepSeek's 'Tech Madman' Founder Is Threatening US Dominance in AI Race As Nuclear Power Makes a Comeback, South Korea Emerges a Winner ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Sign in to access your portfolio
Bloomberg
24-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Stock Movers: Apple, Ant, Clearlake
On this episode of Stock Movers: - Apple is exploring the idea of adding cameras and visual intelligence features to its smartwatch, thrusting the company into the AI wearables market. Also: Apple makes major executive changes following its Siri struggles, while the EU is pushing hard to open up iOS. - Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co. used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Huawei Technologies Co., to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said. It got results similar to those from Nvidia Corp. chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. - Clearlake Capital Group has agreed to acquire Dun & Bradstreet Holdings Inc. in a deal that values one of Wall Street's oldest data and analytics providers at $4.1 billion. The private equity firm will pay $9.15 per share in cash for Jacksonville, Florida-based Dun & Bradstreet, according to a statement Monday that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report.
Bloomberg
24-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Jack Ma's Ant Group Touts AI Breakthrough
Description: Bloomberg has learned that Jack Ma-backed Ant Group has used Chinese-made semiconductors to train AI models. Ant Group claims this would help cut costs by 20%. Bloomberg's Minmin Low reports. (Source: Bloomberg)
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Jack Ma-Backed Ant Touts AI Breakthrough Built on Chinese Chips
(Bloomberg) -- Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co. used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. They Built a Secret Apartment in a Mall. Now the Mall Is Dying. Chicago Transit Faces 'Doomsday Scenario,' Regional Agency Says LA Faces $1 Billion Budget Hole, Warns of Thousands of Layoffs New York Subway Ditches MetroCard After 32 Years for Tap-And-Go Despite Cost-Cutting Moves, Trump Plans to Remake DC in His Style Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Huawei Technologies Co., to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said. It got results similar to those from Nvidia Corp. chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. Ant is still using Nvidia for AI development but is now relying mostly on alternatives including from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Chinese chips for its latest models, one of the people said. The models mark Ant's entry into a race between Chinese and US companies that's accelerated since DeepSeek demonstrated how capable models can be trained for far less than the billions invested by OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. It underscores how Chinese companies are trying to use local alternatives to the most advanced Nvidia semiconductors. While not the most advanced, the H800 is a relatively powerful processor and currently barred by the US from China. The company published a research paper this month that claimed its models at times outperformed Meta Platforms Inc. in certain benchmarks, which Bloomberg News hasn't independently verified. But if they work as advertised, Ant's platforms could mark another step forward for Chinese artificial intelligence development by slashing the cost of inferencing or supporting AI services. As companies pour significant money into AI, MoE models have emerged as a popular option, gaining recognition for their use by Google and Hangzhou startup DeepSeek, among others. That technique divides tasks into smaller sets of data, very much like having a team of specialists who each focus on a segment of a job, making the process more efficient. Ant declined to comment in an emailed statement. However, the training of MoE models typically relies on high-performing chips like the graphics processing units Nvidia sells. The cost has to date been prohibitive for many small firms and limited broader adoption. Ant has been working on ways to train LLMs more efficiently and eliminate that constraint. Its paper title makes that clear, as the company sets the goal to scale a model 'without premium GPUs.' That goes against the grain of Nvidia. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has argued that computation demand will grow even with the advent of more efficient models like DeepSeek's R1, positing that companies will need better chips to generate more revenue, not cheaper ones to cut costs. He's stuck to a strategy of building big GPUs with more processing cores, transistors and increased memory capacity. What Bloomberg Intelligence Says Ant Group's paper highlights the rising innovation and accelerating pace of technological progress in China's AI sector. The firm's claim, if confirmed, highlights China is well on the way to becoming self-sufficient in AI as the country turns to lower-cost, computationally efficient models, to work around the export controls on Nvidia chips. — Robert Lea, senior BI analyst Ant said it cost about 6.35 million yuan ($880,000) to train 1 trillion tokens using high-performance hardware, but its optimized approach would cut that down to 5.1 million yuan using lower-specification hardware. Tokens are the units of information that a model ingests in order to learn about the world and deliver useful responses to user queries. The company plans to leverage the recent breakthrough in the large language models it has developed, Ling-Plus and Ling-Lite, for industrial AI solutions including health care and finance, the people said. Ant bought Chinese online platform this year to beef up its artificial intelligence services in health-care. It also has an AI 'life assistant' app called Zhixiaobao and a financial advisory AI service Maxiaocai. On English-language understanding, Ant said in its paper that the Ling-Lite model did better in a key benchmark compared with one of Meta's Llama models. Both Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus models outperformed DeepSeek's equivalents on Chinese-language benchmarks. 'If you find one point of attack to beat the world's best kung fu master, you can still say you beat them, which is why real-world application is important,' said Robin Yu, chief technology officer of Beijing-based AI solution provider Shengshang Tech Co. Ant has made the Ling models open source. Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters, which are the adjustable settings that work like knobs and dials to direct the model's performance. Ling-Plus has 290 billion parameters, which is considered relatively large in the realm of language models. For comparison, experts estimate that ChatGPT's GPT-4.5 has 1.8 trillion parameters, according to the MIT Technology Review. DeepSeek-R1 has 671 billion. Ant faced challenges in some areas of the training, including stability. Even small changes in the hardware or the model's structure led to problems, including jumps in the models' error rate, it said in the paper. --With assistance from Debby Wu. A New 'China Shock' Is Destroying Jobs Around the World How TD Became America's Most Convenient Bank for Money Launderers Tesla's Gamble on MAGA Customers Won't Work One Man's Crypto Windfall Is Funding a $1 Billion Space Station Dream The Real Reason Trump Is Pushing 'Buy American' ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Sign in to access your portfolio
