KrASIA daily: Hong Kong expects Xiaomi to lead a blockbuster IPO year

Editor’s note: 

Ant Financial, Xiaomi, and Saudi Aramco are highly likely to list in Hong Kong, according to HKEX Chief Executive LI Xiaojia.

Hong Kong is supposed to introduce the result of consultation for dual-class share listing this week.

KrASIA Daily is a five-minute read to brief you everything you need to know to start your day. We only choose the latest tech & startup news that is worth your time, with a focus on Southeast Asia and China.

Southeast Asia:

Indonesia & the Philippines: Indonesian ride-hailing and online payment company Go-Jek is looking to expand into the Philippines, Manila’s transport regulator said on Friday, just days after Uber Technologies Inc shut down its local business as part of its exit from Southeast Asia. (Deal Street Asia)

Malaysia: Malaysian regulators will look into the activity of automated accounts on Twitter, known as bots, in the run-up to a general election if they get complaints about them, the communications and multimedia minister said. (Reuters)

Singapore: KinderWorld Education Group, which runs schools across Southeast Asia, is considering a Singapore initial public offering that could raise about S$70 million ($53 million), people with knowledge of the matter said. (Deal Street Asia)

The Philippines: FHPC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore-based Fullerton Healthcare Corporation, is acquiring a 60 percent controlling stake in the Intellicare group of companies, a leading health maintenance organization (HMO) company in the Philippines, with a membership base of over one million lives. (Deal Street Asia)

Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City-based e-commerce services provider Intrepid has closed a $2-million funding round that ascribes the group a post-money valuation of $9 million. (Deal Street Asia)

Vietnam & Singapore: Vietnam’s online education and booking platform Edu2Review has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Singapore’s Nest Tech venture capital fund. (Deal Street Asia)

China:

Ant Financial, Xiaomi, and Saudi Aramco are highly likely to list in Hong Kong, as the Special Administrative Region is introducing the result of consultation for dual-class share listing next week and if the reform get accepted, companies interested in listing in the city can apply on as soon as April 30, HKEX Chief Executive LI Xiaojia told local media HKEJ. (KrASIA)

Japan’s Toshiba Corp has decided it will cancel the planned $18.6 billion sale of its memory chip unit if it does not get approval from China’s anti-monopoly regulator by May, the Mainichi newspaper said on Sunday. (Reuters)

Jack Ma’s e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba announced on Friday it has fully acquired C-SKY, a company that claims to be China’s only chip maker that mass-produces CPU IP cores, adding to a trend among tech giants like Facebook, Google and Apple to design chips themselves to lower their dependence on chip makers, as well as fulling Alibaba’s efforts to devote to its cloud-based Internet of Things businesses. (KrASIA)

Alibaba is developing its own neural network chip, the Ali-NPU, which will be used in AI applications, such as image video analysis, machine learning, and other scenarios, Yicai is reporting. After the chip is mature, it will provide services for businesses through Ali Cloud. (Technode)

SITECH, one of the many Chinese EV makers, unveiled its new DEV1 which comes in two models, one flagship and one customized for Mobike, which first inked the partnership deal with SITECH last year-end. The customized model, known as DEV1 Sharing Version, or SITECH for Mobike, is a compact size EV comes with the company’s proprietary D-OS smart driving system. (KrASIA)

Singapore-based GSELab which was founded earlier this year might be established by a current Ofo employee, according to some recent Chinese local media reports, hinting that Ofo might be backing the newly-founded blockchain startup that characterizes itself as the world’s first digital currency platform based on the sharing economy and blockchain technology. (KrASIA)

Tencent, long known as a tech giant with social and gaming products that distract people’s attention and focus on work, is reportedly making another attempt at enterprise market by launching an online document service that is similar to Google Docs. (KrASIA)

FAW (short for First Automotive Works) has made an unspecified investment in electric vehicle start-up Byton, with the two companies cooperating in research and development, production, sales and services.(SCMP)

Ucommune chairman Mao Daqing has predicted no more new players will enter China’s crowded co-working office space industry as the pace of consolidation picks up in the market. (SCMP)

Chinese consumers ordered 80,000 durians the minute a new online promotion went live as part of a Chinese-Thai initiative to help sell the Southeast Asian country’s local products via the internet. (SCMP)

A monitoring system designed to collect biometric data on outpatients suffering from chronic diseases will be trialled in mainland hospitals this year, a programme that British software developer Medopad and its Chinese partners regard as an important step in developing new services in the “health tech” business. (SCMP)

China’s foreign ministry warned the United States government about turning the tide in Sino-US relations as an export ban threatens to put ZTE Corp, the country’s largest listed telecommunications equipment maker, out of business. (SCMP)

Chinese tech company Huawei wants to change the way people talk to their artificially intelligent voice assistants. The firm plans to make those conversations more emotionally interactive, according to senior executives. (CNBC)

Ctrip.Com International Ltd, Asia’s biggest online travel firm, would welcome the chance to list at home in mainland China should regulators introduce depositary receipts as planned, Chief Executive Jane Sun told Reuters on Friday. (Deal Street Asia)

World:

Bitcoin gained as much as 4 percent Friday, putting it on pace for its first back-to-back week of gains this year. The mini-rally is helping to ease the pain from the more than 50 percent loss in the first quarter that followed last year’s 1,400 percent surge. (Bloomberg)

Apple said component failure in a limited number of MacBook Pros has caused built-in battery to expand, adding, it will offer worldwide free replacement for such batteries. (Reuters)

Twitter said on Friday that it has banned ads from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, saying the cyber-security company’s business model conflicts with advertising rules and citing U.S. government claims that Kaspersky has ties to Russian intelligence agencies. (Reuters)

U.S. technology stocks tumbled on Friday ahead of a crucial week of quarterly reports from Alphabet, Facebook and other heavyweights as investors worried that the high-performance sector may be running out of fuel. (Reuters)