Coronavirus pandemic: Africa gets much-need care package from Jack Ma

With the coronavirus increasing its spread across Africa, the continent received a much-needed care package from Chinese billionaire Jack Ma.
A cargo flight containing more than 6 million medical items arrived Sunday in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. The supplies from Ma, the founder of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, will be distributed to African countries in need of supplies to battle the spreading Covid-19 pandemic.
An Ethiopian Airlines cargo flight from Guangzhou, China arrived with 5.4 million face masks, 1.08 million testing kits, 40,000 sets of protective clothing and 60,000 protective face shields, according to Ethiopian officials and the Jack Ma Foundation.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last week pledged to distribute the supplies to other countries in Africa. Ma has sent similar shipments of medical supplies to countries in Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America.
The virus has been relatively slow to reach Africa but has now spread to at least 43 of the continent's 54 countries, with more than 1,100 cases confirmed. In response many African countries are imposing restrictions.
Mozambique confirmed its first case Sunday and cancelled all visas to the country, closed schools and banned gatherings of more than 50 people.
Kenya announced new restrictions Sunday, after it confirmed eight new cases, bringing its total to 15. It closed all bars and restaurants as of midnight Sunday and halted all services at churches and mosques, saying that houses of worship had not implemented safe social distancing. Kenya also suspended all international passenger flights effective Wednesday and closed the border posts to neighboring Uganda, except for the transport of cargo.
In Burkina Faso, the U.S. ambassador, Andrew Young, announced on his personal Twitter account Sunday that he has tested positive for the virus, He is in quarantine and local sources say he has not gone to a hospital.
Burkina Faso has 75 cases and four deaths as of Sunday, one of the highest number of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.
Young is the first U.S. ambassador to say that he has tested positive for Covid-19 and the second ambassador in Burkina Faso to contract the virus, according to diplomats. Earlier this week Italian ambassador, Andrea Romussi, told AP he was positive, but was feeling fine. Burkina Faso's government has also been badly impacted by the virus with at least four Cabinet ministers confirmed as positive.

How Alibaba founder Jack Ma is ripping a $12 trillion stock market

International News
Jack Ma is riding high this week. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the company he founded, has won approval to forge ahead with a Hong Kong share sale that could raise at least $10 billion. On Monday, China’s largest e-commerce company logged more than $38.3 billion of purchases during its annual Singles’ Day shopping event, a new record.
The rest of China’s retail sector hasn't been so lucky. Just as shoppers were placing gadgets in their carts, investors were selling their consumer stocks. In two days, Gree Electric Appliances Inc. of Zhuhai and peer Midea Group Co. tumbled 7.4% and 6.2%. That’s despite electronics companies notching a 30% rise in sales this Singles’ Day.
What explains the selloff?
Blame Jack the Ripper. He’s killing the most beloved trade in China’s $12 trillion stock market: a bet on consumers. The retail sector, excluding cars, has been remarkably resilient this year.
Now Alibaba’s Singles’ Day has kicked off a price war. Over the weekend, Gree announced it would forgo 3 billion yuan ($427.5 million) in profit just to please China’s lonesome hearts. Its air conditioners sold for as little as 1,399 yuan, a 42% discount, both online and at the company’s thousands of retail outlets. China’s biggest electronics makers have been caught in a three-way race, so it’s little surprise that rivals from Midea to Haier Electronics Group Co. quickly followed suit.
Investors were already looking at Monday’s stellar statistics with suspicion, after an alarming report over the weekend that producer prices fell again in October. Call it bad timing — blockbuster sales on the heels of dour economic data. It’s also a stern reminder that deflation still grips broad swathes of the economy.

There are good reasons to like consumer stocks. They are a bet on China’s rising middle class. Companies like Gree and Midea are also highly profitable, both notching a return on equity of more than 25%. This may not last much longer, however, with falling prices spreading through China’s manufacturing sector. A full-blown price war that erodes these companies’ profitability seems inevitable. ...READ MORE

Jack Ma takes on Elon Musk over future of Artificial Intelligence

Current Affairs

Jack Ma believes artificial intelligence poses no threat to humanity, but Elon Musk called that "famous last words" as the billionaire tech tycoons faced off Thursday in an occasionally animated debate on futurism in Shanghai.
The Chinese co-founder of Alibaba and the maverick industrialist behind Tesla and SpaceX frequently pulled pained expressions and raised eyebrows as they kicked off an AI conference with a dialogue that challenged attendees to keep up, veering from technology to Mars, death, and jobs.
However, the hot topic in the hour-long talk was AI, which has provoked increasing concern among scientists such as late British cosmologist Stephen Hawking who warned that it will eventually turn on and "annihilate" humanity.
"Computers may be clever, but human beings are much smarter," Ma said. "We invented the computer -- I've never seen a computer invent a human being."
While insisting that he is "not a tech guy," the e-commerce mogul added: "I think AI can help us understand humans better. I don't think it's a threat."
Musk countered: "I don't know man, that's like, famous last words." He said the "rate of advancement of computers in general is insane", sketching out a vision in which super-fast, artificially intelligent devices eventually tire of dealing with dumb, slow humans.
"The computer will just get impatient if nothing else. It will be like talking to a tree," Musk said.

 Mankind's hope lies in "going along for the ride" by harnessing some of that computing power, Musk said, as he offered an unabashed plug for his Neuralink Corporation...Read More

How Jack Ma's $290 billion loan machine is changing Chinese banking

International News

Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.
Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.
The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.
For China’s $13 trillion economy, which expanded at its weakest pace since at least 1992 last quarter, the implications could be profound. Non-state firms -- mostly small businesses -- account for about 60% of growth, employ 80% of workers, and have been disproportionately squeezed by a more than two-year government crackdown on shadow lenders.
“Small and medium enterprises are really the boiler room of the economy,” said Keith Pogson, a senior partner in charge of banking and capital markets at Ernst & Young LLP in Hong Kong. “It used to be a segment that banks thought was too difficult and too risky. But now they run their model and work out what the risks are so they feel more comfortable.”

 China is quickly becoming a world leader in the use of big data and artificial-intelligence technology to make loans...Read More

Mukesh Ambani in Foreign Policy’s 2019 list of top ‘100 Global Thinkers’

Current Affairs:

Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani featured in Foreign Policy magazine’s 2019 annual list of the top ‘100 Global Thinkers’.

According to the magazine, Ambani, who displaced Jack Ma in 2018 as Asia’s richest man is credited with accelerating a smartphone internet revolution in the world’s largest democracy.

“With a fortune of $44.3 billion, Mukesh Ambani displaced Jack Ma in 2018 as Asia’s richest man. Ambani’s fortune comes from his holdings in the oil, gas, and retail sectors, but he’s likely to make his biggest impact on India through his new telecom venture Jio,” the magazine said on its website.

  India shall lead the world in digital connectivity soon, says Mukesh Ambani

“By offering cellular data and voice free for the first six months after Jio’s launch, Ambani got more than 100 million Indians to sign up-accelerating a smartphone internet revolution in the world’s largest democracy. The next stage of Ambani’s plan is to use the digital airwaves to sell content and lifestyle products, eventually competing with Google and Facebook…Read More