China Executive Insights
BYD raised the price of its "God's Eye B" assisted driving laser radar package by 2,100 RMB (~21%) starting May 1, yet sales staff at multiple dealerships report that customer demand remains largely unaffected, signaling strong pricing power in China's intelligent driving market.
Unitree Robotics, China's leading humanoid robot company, has officially expanded into South Korea, with its G1 robot becoming the first humanoid robot to participate in a Buddhist ordination ceremony at Jogye Temple in Seoul, receiving the dharma name "Gabi."
Unitree Robotics has officially opened UniStore, a robot task-motion app store allowing users to download and install complex motion packages — including Jackson dance moves, Leeter Kune Do, and Charleston — onto their Unitree G1/H1/B2/Go2 robots with one tap from a phone app.
Vidu Claw, developed by Shengshu Technology, has introduced a Creator Plan that enables anyone to produce cinema-quality 30-second ads for roughly 100 RMB — a potential seismic disruption to the traditional advertising production industry that has historically required weeks and millions of dollars.
Meituan has launched a public beta of "MiYou" (觅游), an AI-native community built around AI Agents with identities, relationships and growth trajectories. Users raise "shrimp" (AI agents) that find earning opportunities, meet partners, and grow alongside them. Over 3,000 Agents and 40,000+ skills are already active on the platform.
Kunluncore (昆仑芯), Baidu's AI chip spinoff with 15 years in AI computing, has formally engaged CICC for STAR Market listing. The company filed concurrently for Hong Kong listing on January 1, marking a dual-listing strategy. Its self-developed P800 32K GPU cluster is China's first officially lit self-developed trillion-parameter AI cluster.
Huawei's first MatePad Pro Max tablet has appeared on overseas official sites, revealing key specs: 13.2-inch flexible OLED PaperMatte display at 3mm thickness, 4.7mm body, pre-installed HarmonyOS 4.3, and a 10,300 mAh battery supporting 66W wired and 40W reverse wireless charging.
Every Wednesday and Friday, TechNode’s Briefing newsletter delivers a roundup of the most important news in China tech, straight to your inbox. Your support helps TechNode continue to provide credible, on-the-ground journalism and industry insights about the Chinese tech industry. From June 17 to 20 June 2026, Porte de Versailles (Paris) will host the 10th edition of VivaTech, Europe’s largest event dedicated to startups and technology. The event has established itself as an unmissable meeting platform for the tech world, at the crossroads of innovation, business and the most important debates around technology, with AI at the heart of every conversation. This anniversary edition reaffirms VivaTech’s ambition to amplify the voice of tech among professionals, through renowned companies and speakers from the international tech world. A “takeover” of the Champs-Élysées (June 14) and the VivaTech Festival (June 20) will bring tech to as many people as possible. Over ten years, VivaTech has seen 300 percent audience growth, going from 45,000 to more than 180,000 visitors in 2025, representing 171 countries. The number of startups has tripled, and investors have multiplied by 12.
Alibaba's Happy Horse AI video model topped anonymous leaderboards in April, but gray testing revealed a gap between benchmark performance and real usability. Built for high-volume, low-cost commercial content rather than AI film direction, Happy Horse is reframing itself as the "donkey that eats grass and produces milk" — a reliable, affordable content pipeline for e-commerce merchants.
Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, has closed a ~$2 billion funding round at a post-money valuation exceeding $20 billion, with Meituan Longzhu leading the investment alongside China Mobile and CPE源峰. The company has raised nearly $4 billion in under six months, making it the best-funded AI startup in China.
Genesis AI, a French robotics startup, has released its first foundation model GENE-26.5 — featuring a robot that autonomously cracks eggs, cuts tomatoes, makes smoothies, solves Rubik's cubes, and organizes cables. The company's approach: large-scale human operation data pretraining combined with simulation closed-loop evaluation, moving robot manipulation toward a foundation model training paradigm.
Every Wednesday and Friday, TechNode’s Briefing newsletter delivers a roundup of the most important news in China tech, straight to your inbox. Your support helps TechNode continue to provide credible, on-the-ground journalism and industry insights about the Chinese tech industry. Supercell announced this week that it has completed the full acquisition of Metacore and its flagship title Merge Mansion, a deal that has drawn attention across the global games industry and further highlighted Tencent’s evolving strategy in the casual gaming sector. Since Tencent acquired a majority stake in Supercell for roughly $8.6 billion in 2016, the Finnish studio has continued to operate with a high degree of independence. Rather than folding Supercell into a traditional top-down structure, Tencent has allowed the company to maintain its small-team, high-autonomy development model — an approach widely credited for helping sustain long-life-cycle titles such as Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars. Against that backdrop, the Metacore acquisition is being viewed less as a standalone transaction and more as a strategic extension of Supercell’s broader portfolio.