Asia has no shortage of entrepreneurs, engineers or giant domestic markets. Yet when it comes to producing the kind of blockbuster listings seen in the U.S., the region continues to lag. 

The challenge is not a lack of technological capability. Across China, India, South Korea and Japan, companies dominate industries ranging from semiconductors and electric vehicles to robotics and advanced manufacturing. The bigger question is whether Asia’s capital markets are structured to nurture firms into mega-cap public companies.

“Asia has the technological capability, scale, and talent base to support mega-IPOs, but capital markets remain constrained by structural and behavioral factors,” said Lenny Zéphirin, founder of the Zephirin Group. 

Asia has produced large listings, but few on the scale of the U.S.’s biggest technology offerings.

Memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is planning a Shanghai IPO expected to raise at least 29.5 billion yuan ($4.3 billion), potentially the country’s largest since 2022, and Indian telco Jio Platforms is seeking a valuation of about $120 billion in its planned IPO.

In comparison, Space X debuted at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, even topping $2 trillion in its earliest days of trading.

A valuation premium has historically prompted some of Asia’s biggest technology companies to tap U.S. markets. Chinese internet giants Alibaba and JD.com both listed in New York to access deeper pools of international capital before later pursuing listings in Hong Kong.

A common theme emerges across the region: companies often face less patient private capital, stricter listing requirements and lower valuation multiples than their U.S. counterparts.

“The big driver in the U.S. has been a very large amount of private capital being available through private equity firms to carry these sorts of firms through to a stage where they come to market with a very, very high valuation,” said John Fildes, partner at Bain & Co.

The U.S. market also continues to reward technology companies with higher valuation multiples than Asian exchanges, echoed analysts.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has “largely conceded” China’s artificial intelligence chip market to Huawei, as U.S. export restrictions continue to reshape the global AI semiconductor landscape.

Huang’s comments came as Nvidia reported another blockbuster quarter, with revenue surging 85% to $81.62 billion from $44.06 billion a year earlier. The company also unveiled an $80 billion share buyback program and raised its dividend.

However, China remained a key flashpoint.

“The demand in China is quite large,” Huang told CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “Huawei is very, very strong. They had a record year, they’ll likely, very likely, have an extraordinary year coming up, and their local ecosystem of chip companies are doing quite well, because we’ve evacuated that market.” 

“We’ve really largely conceded that market to them,” he added. 

The remarks underscore how Washington’s tightening restrictions on advanced AI chip exports have accelerated Beijing’s push toward semiconductor self-sufficiency. 

The Chinese market once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue. However, the company has effectively been shut out of the market after the Trump administration told Nvidia in April that it would need a license to export chips to China and to a handful of other countries. 

In the interview with CNBC, Huang struck a cautious tone on prospects for any near-term reopening of the Chinese market, saying Nvidia had told investors to “expect nothing” regarding approvals to sell advanced chips into the country.

Huang was a last-minute addition to President Donald Trump’s China summit last week, though the visit did little to clarify whether Nvidia’s H200 chips will be permitted in the country. 

Reuters reported last week that some Chinese companies had received approval from the U.S. Commerce Department to purchase H200 chips, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com.

Still, a U.S. trade representative said chip export controls were not part of discussions during last week’s China talks, indicating that any significant easing of restrictions on H200 sales may remain distant. 

Nvidia is also expanding its supply chain aggressively as it prepares for what Huang described as a massive growing opportunity tied to the broader AI economy.

“The idea of [a]…

Chinese equities could get a fresh boost after this week’s high-stakes meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with investors saying the summit could ease trade tensions and revive momentum, especially in the country’s lagging technology shares.

Goldman Sachs analysts said discussions were expected to focus narrowly on trade and export controls, including tariffs, semiconductor restrictions and rare earth exports. The bank said it expected China to agree to buy more U.S. agriculture products, energy and aircraft in exchange for avoiding further tariff escalation.

While Goldman does not expect a sweeping “grand bargain,” it said the meeting could still “act as a tactical catalyst for strength in the Chinese yuan and in Chinese equities.”

Dong Chen, chief investment officer at Bank J Safra Sarasin, viewed the summit as a near-term catalyst for Chinese equities, especially after months of underperformance compared with U.S. technology peers riding the artificial intelligence boom.

While markets did not appear to have “extremely high expectations” for the meeting, Chen said investors have been fairly upbeat. The fact that Trump and Xi were already meeting sent a “positive signal,” he added.

The prospect of even a limited thaw in relations is particularly important for Chinese technology firms, which remain constrained by U.S. chip export restrictions. It also comes as global investors continue piling into AI-related trades, particularly in South Korea and Taiwan.

Jiong Shao, China internet analyst at Barclays, highlighted that “the most important competitive arena today, especially between U.S. and China, is in AI, and the greatest bottleneck today in AI is compute.”

“The secret weapon, or not so secret weapon for the U.S. AI players, is access to the Nvidia chips, which Chinese companies don’t have,” he said.

That has made Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s presence in Beijing alongside Trump especially noteworthy for investors watching the AI race, he explained.

“Having access to Nvidia’s latest chips… is very, very critical for the Chinese players to compete on a global stage,” Shao said.

Shortly after Trump met Xi, Reuters reported that Washington had cleared sales of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to several major Chinese technology firms, citing three people familiar with the matter. The roughly 10 Chinese firms include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com in a potential breakthrough for China’s AI sector.

Investors are also increasingly warming to China’s AI ecosystem after recent earnings from companies such as Alibaba and Tencent suggested cloud and AI-related demand was accelerating.

Shao said investors had initially questioned whether massive AI spending by…

BEIJING — So many people in China are rushing to try the OpenClaw artificial intelligence tool that they’re driving up prices for secondhand Mac computers.

That’s according to Jeremy Ji, chief strategy officer and general manager of international business at ATRenew, a used consumer electronics buyer and reseller that works with Apple and retailer JD.com in mainland China.

OpenClaw is an AI agent, a tool that can autonomously conduct personal tasks such as sending emails and shopping online. Usage in China is currently outstripping the U.S., according to American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard.

However, the free-to-download software also poses security risks, prompting many users to run OpenClaw on a cloud computing server or laptop separate from their primary device. If allowed direct access to a personal computer, the AI agent could autonomously alter private data such as banking information, or enable hackers to access it more easily.

As people in China jump on the OpenClaw trend, they are turning to preowned computers, Ji said in a phone interview.

He likened the demand surge to the pandemic, when many people bought more personal computing devices since they were working and spending more time at home.

As a result, from March to May this year, Ji said that ATRenew is keeping its prices for Apple products similar to those seen during the peak fall season around new iPhone releases. That contrasts with a typical price drop during the spring.

Ji said prices for a new MacBook are typically 15% higher than the used ones sold through ATRenew.

Apple’s self-developed chips, the latest of which is called the M5, are generally more power-efficient than chips for computers running Windows systems. For early OpenClaw adopters, the popular hardware of choice has been Apple’s Mac Mini.

ATRenew’s Ji said the company is seeing people trade-in their MacBooks with older M1 and M2 chips for computers with the M4 or M5 chip. “We do see the growing demand for laptops, PCs as a whole, but the Mac devices benefit from that trend [to try OpenClaw] above all.”

Consumer interest in more powerful secondhand MacBooks is “still going very strong,” Ji said, noting that ATRenew has had to increase its price for buying back devices in order to increase the supply of secondhand Macs available for purchase. He predicted the trend could continue “throughout the whole year.”

An Austrian developer, Peter Steinberger, launched OpenClaw in November. But the latest wave of interest in China only picked up early this month as Tencent and other Chinese tech companies used OpenClaw as a way to attract more users.

ATRenew’s Ji declined to share the exact volume of MacBooks handled since late February, but…

JD.com launched its long-anticipated European online shopping platform on Monday, as the Chinese e-commerce giant looks to challenge Amazon as well as domestic rivals that have already expanded internationally.

Joybuy, JD.com’s international online shopping brand, launches in six new markets, including the U.K. and Germany, with the company banking on fast deliveries and high-quality products to get an edge on rivals.

While peers like AliExpress and Temu operate an asset-light model and ship goods directly from China, JD.com has its own local warehouses and logistics networks that enable it to minimize delivery times.

The approach has been successful in China, where JD has developed an extensive logistics network for super-fast deliveries and established itself as a destination for domestic consumers to buy global brands such as Apple.

The Chinese tech giant said customers in Europe can get same-day delivery on orders placed before 11 a.m. For orders over £29 in the U.K., there’s no extra cost.

Joybuy will also feature brand stores from companies including L’Oréal Paris and De’Longhi. These are effectively a branded space in the Joybuy app where companies can showcase their official goods.

JD.com is stepping into a highly-competitive European e-commerce market, which features heavyweights like Amazon, as well as smaller local players and rival services from Alibaba‘s AliExpress and Temu-owner PDD.

Both AliExpress and Temu have sought to bring competitively-priced products to the European market, but have relied on a marketplace model of third-party merchants who sell through their platforms.

While Temu and AliExpress have been operating internationally for the past few years, JD is hoping to catch up.

Joybuy emphasizes its ownership of much of the inventory that it sells.

“We’re at first party retailer, we’re completely different to every other retailer based on our customer proposition,” Matthew Nobbs, U.K. managing director of Joybuy, told CNBC in an interview.

“So we don’t do any de minimus business. We’re a retailer, first, and foremost for brands, and that’s our core.”

“De minimis” refers to a rule in various countries that gives customs duties exemptions for low-value goods.

This report is from this week’s CNBC’s The China Connection newsletter, which brings you insights and analysis on what’s driving the world’s second-largest economy. You can subscribe here.

Latest data from China showed a key gauge on consumption falling to its weakest level in nearly three years. But it does not capture the full story.

American membership warehouse clubs are telling something more nuanced: they are finding success in drawing consumers who are willing to pay a hefty membership fee in exchange for premium goods at reasonable prices. On top of that, those stores provide no-frill “treasure-hunt” shopping experiences to sweeten the deal.

Sam’s Club, the membership-based warehouse retail arm of Walmart, opened its new store in Beijing last month, followed by another one in Shanghai on Tuesday. They drew large crowds, snarling traffic for hours and keeping consumers in long queues.

Walmart plans to open 10 new Sam’s Club outlets in China this year — its fastest expansion ever — and is on track to reach this target, with its 10th store opening in Guangzhou next week.

Such warehouse stores have long been known as places to buy large quantities of household staples at cheaper prices.

Even though it’s less typical in China, where grocery habits have historically skewed toward high-frequency, smaller-basket shopping, this retail model is starting to find its customers.

“Here they do buy it because of the value and niche products,” said Cameron Johnson, Shanghai-based senior partner at consulting firm Tidal Wave Solutions. He said residents in his compound often ask in group chats whether others want to split oversized packs.

Sam’s Club has leaned into that proposition: a shopping experience and product lineup distinct from conventional supermarkets and online retailers, paired with annual membership fees ranging from 260 yuan to 680 yuan ($37-$97). Shoppers get modest discounts — but the bigger draw is access to curated merchandise that they can’t find elsewhere.

“It’s a membership model that consumers pay the membership fee upfront, and as a result, they get a full set of services,” said Weiwen Han, a Hong Kong-based partner at Bain & Company.

Walmart’s success

Walmart entered China in 1996 with its first hypermarket and Sam’s Club warehouse chain in Shenzhen.

But the hypermarket format — which combines a supermarket and department store — has lost momentum as digital retail took off. Sprawling online marketplaces, such as Alibaba and JD.com, with their aggressive discounts and convenience, have squeezed out traditional grocers and foreign players such as France-based Carrefour.

Walmart has closed almost 150 hypermarkets in China since 2020, with just 279 stores operational as of July, down from 412 in 2020.

But Sam’s Club has proven an…

BEIJING — Preliminary figures for China’s biggest shopping event of the year indicated slower sales as consumers tie their purse strings tighter amid weak economic growth.

The Double 11 shopping festival this year recorded 1.695 trillion yuan (about $238 billion) in sales across all platforms, marking a 14.2% jump year on year, according to Chinese consumer research firm Syntun. That’s slower than the 26.6% year on year growth last year.

Consumers were “more rational and willing to pay for real value, exhibiting a “tiered system based on needs” characteristic,” according to a Google translation of the report.

Singles’ Day, also known as Double 11, is China’s biggest shopping event of the year and, in terms of value of goods sold, far exceeds that of Black Friday in the U.S.

But as China’s economic growth has slowed, companies have increasingly extended the promotional period, and stopped reporting gross merchandise volume — an industry measure of sales over time.

China’s top leaders last month signaled they will increase efforts to support consumption. Beijing has preferred to subsidize consumer purchases of targeted goods such as electronics, rather than handing out cash.

The country is expected to report 2.8% year-on-year growth in retail sales for October, according to a Reuters poll. That would be down from 3% growth in September.

Jacob Cooke, co-founder and CEO of WPIC Marketing + Technologies, which helps Western consumer brands sell online in China, estimated overall sales growth this year will be in the “high-single digits to low-double digits” versus in 2024.

Still, more than 10 flagship online stores selling from fashion to health products saw orders at least 30% above expectations, Cooke said.

“That’s really rare for us,” he added. “We wouldn’t like to underestimate or overestimate our internal numbers.”

JD.com reported a record transaction value for this Singles’ Day as of Tuesday midnight, without disclosing the amount. The consumer electronics-focused platform reported a nearly 60% increase in orders and over 40% growth in users placing orders.

The Chinese giant kicked off its promotions this year on Oct. 9, several days earlier than last year.

Alibaba in contrast is pushing its shopping event through Nov. 14 this year, after kicking off promotions on Oct. 15.

The two companies, along with Tiktok shop, ushered in 67 billion yuan solely on instant retail sale, a 138.4% year-on-year increase, according to data from Syntun.

In contrast, community group-buying, where consumers create groups to buy groceries in bulk, brought in 9 billion yuan – a 35.3% year-on-year decrease, the report showed.

Chinese smartphone and consumer electronics giant Xiaomi said that as of 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, it…

Shares of SoftBank Group plunged nearly 9% on Friday, marking its third straight day of selloff after the Japanese giant said it had sold its entire stake in U.S. chip giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion. 

The stock pared losses to trade 5% lower as of 9 p.m. ET. If the losses hold, this would mark the second straight week of selloff after the conglomerate saw almost $50 billion in market cap wiped out last week, marking its worst weekly loss since March 2020.

SoftBank disclosed in its latest earnings that it offloaded 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October and scaled back its T-Mobile stake, bringing in $9.17 billion.

Although the Nvidia sale surprised some investors, it isn’t the first time SoftBank has exited the U.S. chip giant. Its Vision Fund had accumulated roughly $4 billion worth of Nvidia shares in 2017 before selling out entirely in early 2019.

Even so, SoftBank continues to have business ties to Nvidia. The Tokyo-based company is involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.

Several other tech stocks in the region also declined. Semiconductor testing equipment maker Advantest and Tokyo Electron, a chip production equipment maker, fell by over 3% and 4% respectively.

Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, fell 2.04%. South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix was more than 5% lower, while Samsung Electronics lost 3.8%.

Shares of Tencent declined 5.61%, while JD.com was down 4.31%.

Overnight in the U.S., technology giants came away battered. Nvidia and Broadcom notably declined 3.6% and 4.3%, respectively, while Google parent Alphabet fell 2.8%.

“The sell-off of SoftBank today is less idiosyncratic to SoftBank, and more driven by broader market sentiment on semiconductors and technology stocks,” said Rolf Bulk, senior equity research analyst at New Street Research.

“In that context and with SoftBank’s holding discount still very low vs. historic averages, SoftBank trading down 5-6% today does not surprise me.”

China’s latest shopping festival, which wrapped up Wednesday, pointed to a pickup in consumption, as e-commerce companies reported strong sales of consumer electronics, as well as beauty and pet care products.

The 618 festival is one of the biggest promotional periods of the year in China as Alibaba, JD.com and other major Chinese e-commerce platforms roll out discounts.

This year, the festival’s gross merchandise value, a measure of sales over time, surged by 15.2% from last year to an estimated to 855.6 billion yuan ($119 billion), according to retail data provider Syntun.

That points to some recovery in consumption, after Syntun data for last year’s 618 festival revealed a year-on-year decline in sales for the first time in eight years. However, as has been the case with other annual shopping events, retailers expanded the promotional period to start May 13, a week earlier than in 2024, before ending June 18.

Still, JD.com said the number of shoppers participating hit a record high, more than doubling year on year between May 30 and June 18 to an unspecified figure. More than 2.2 billion orders were recorded across JD’s channels, which include online and offline stores, food delivery and quick commerce, according to the retailer.

Investors were surprised Monday by a better-than-expected 6.4% increase in national retail sales in May from a year ago — the fastest increase since December 2023, according to official data accessed via Wind Information.

Chinese consumers are spending “a lot of money on outerwear. Cosmetics and beauty doing really well,” Jacob Cooke, co-founder and CEO of WPIC Marketing + Technologies, told CNBC on Friday. The company helps foreign brands — such as Vitamix and iS Clinical — sell online in China and other parts of Asia.

His firm estimates that gross merchandise value during 618 grew by around 14.1% from a year ago, pointing to a slightly slower increase than what Syntun reported.

He also pointed to growing numbers of customers outside of China’s big, well-known cities, based on the packages he’s seen leaving his company’s warehouse. 

Similarly, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s Taobao and Tmall reported strong sales in categories eligible for government subsidies — with initial sales more than tripling from the same period around the Nov. 11 Singles’ Day shopping festival, indicating increased consumer interest in the newest batch of subsidies.

Taobao’s generative artificial intelligence tools also boosted sales. Its…

BEIJING — Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com reported earnings this week that not only reflected improving Chinese consumer spending, but also the growing benefits of artificial intelligence in advertising.

E-commerce giant Alibaba said late Thursday its Taobao and Tmall group sales rose by 9% year on year to 101.37 billion yuan ($13.97 billion) for the three months ended March 31. That’s above the 97.94 billion yuan predicted by a FactSet analyst poll, and the quarterly growth figure was well above the 3% segment increase for the 12-month period ending March 31.

“The e-commerce and ad revenues were positive surprises as there were expectations tariffs would affect consumer behavior,” Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, said in an email regarding the three companies’ earnings results.

It’s important to note the earnings releases cover only the period before U.S.-China tensions escalated in April with new tariffs of more than 100% on products from both countries — an effective trade embargo. The two countries issued a rare joint statement Monday announcing a 90-day reduction in most of the recently added tariffs.

The U.S.-China trade dispute since April has negatively affected consumption to some extent, given the increased uncertainty for small and medium-sized businesses, Charlie Chen, managing director and head of Asia research at China Renaissance Securities, said Friday. He expects that as trade tensions ease, consumption will rise.

But despite lackluster consumption overall, sales of certain electronics and home appliances have done well since last year thanks to China’s trade-in subsidies for supporting such consumer spending.

JD.com on Tuesday said its sales of for that category surged by 17% from a year ago. Overall, the e-commerce company reported a 16.3% increase in revenue from its retail business to 263.85 billion yuan in the three months ended March 31. That was better than the 226.84 billion yuan in retail segment sales predicted by a FactSet poll.

On Wednesday, Tencent said its “fintech and business services” segment, a proxy for consumer-related business transactions, reported a 5% year-on-year revenue increase to 54.9 billion yuan in the first quarter.

While Nomura analysts said that segment revenue growth was in line with estimates, they pointed out in a note that “Tencent ads was a big outperformer in the Chinese ads industry despite the challenging macro environment.”

Tencent’s marketing services revenue surged by 20% to 31.9 billion yuan, helped by “robust advertiser demand” for short videos and other content inside its WeChat social media app. Tencent noted “ongoing AI upgrades” to its advertising platform.