The Belt 
Four years in the making DJI first started a ground-cleaning robot project in 2020, and reports of an imminent launch have circulated since late 2024. The Romo family is expected to span standard, advanced and flagship tiers with features such as auto water refill, and pre-orders have already opened. DJI’s pitch leans on a simple … Read more
From testing to ecosystem The move marks a shift in how Shenzhen frames autonomous driving. After a city-wide pilot plan in 2024 and a ‘4123’ blueprint in 2025, the 2026 ‘five-party’ model adds a governance-and-operation structure on top of the technology. The city is explicitly moving from a phase of proving the vehicles work to … Read more
Jaime Xiao on why every Chinese VC makes the founder sign a personal liability clause if the company fails to return capital within six to eight years, and how that single term explains the absence of an M&A market, the rise of financial-advisor middlemen, and the death of cold outreach in Chinese fundraising.
Jaime Xiao argues that China’s totalising state can build semiconductor fabs, EVs, and high-speed rail, but it suffocates the one industry that needs unplanned space: football. He uses the 1927 Lee Wai-Tong tour of Australia as proof that a fractured China once fielded a competitive team, then explains why today’s tracked-and-funnelled middle class can never … Read more
Counterpoint Research reports that global smartphone SoC shipments fell 15 per cent in the first half of 2026, hit by surging memory prices, cautious inventory control and longer replacement cycles. MediaTek held the top share at 32 per cent, Qualcomm was second at 22 per cent, Apple 19 per cent, UNISOC 13 per cent and … Read more
Calls and downloads ‘Calls’ mean individuals who lack local deployment pay per token to use a model online. ‘Downloads’ are organisations, banks, governments and energy firms pulling models in to embed in their own systems, the core ‘AI plus’ indicator, and China leads there as well. Across Africa, with 1,500 to 3,000 languages, many local-language … Read more
The forerunner’s bet Liao frames the past 30 years as two vertical lines, the processor line from CPU to AI and the connectivity line from telephone to mobile network, with a counter-intuitive proposition: the more successful and monopolised the application layer, the more the underlying chip withers, because a dominant customer sets direction and a … Read more
The numbers Both companies turned free cash flow negative for the first time. Google’s was minus 5.9 billion dollars, its first negative since the 2004 IPO. Tesla’s was minus 1.1 billion, its first in about two years. The driver is capital expenditure: Google’s second-quarter capex doubled to 44.9 billion dollars, nearly 5 billion a day, … Read more
Why Kelin picked Kepler The power and electricity track is the most certain, largest humanoid landing spot, and State Grid tenders are concentrated in the tens of billions of yuan, shifting competition toward scenario fit and scaled delivery. Kelin has spent years in the grid and energy system, holding national grid government-enterprise channels, industry access … Read more
Not a border ban Unitree secured CSRC approval for its listing on 2 July, but under the FCC rule its new US-bound products face fresh access questions. It flagged the US market risk in its updated prospectus on 31 July. The US was 18.39, 19.54 and 13.30 per cent of revenue in 2023, 2024 and … Read more