Alibaba and Tencent are two household names in the global technology sphere. For a long time now, these two Chinese giants have slugged it out on their home turf in a struggle to achieve dominance in the growing Chinese internet consumer market. Having had a duopoly advantage thanks to China’s “Great Firewall,” these two, battle-hardened titans of the tech industry have sought to extend their businesses beyond their borders.

Jack Ma is making plans for a future after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the business he co-founded and turned into Asia’s most valuable company.Ma will unveil succession plans Monday and work on the transition over a significant period of time, according to the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong newspaper owned by Alibaba.

On 18 June 2018, the founder of e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, Jack Ma launched the company’s office in Kuala Lumpur. The office is Alibaba’s first in Southeast Asia and will be the first Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) hub outside of China. The eWTP is a concept coined by Jack Ma which involves the creation of digital free-trade zones where small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can easily plug into global trade via e-commerce.

Google’s latest move of investing in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com reveals that the company is stepping up its game to make inroads in Asia. On Monday, tech conglomerate Google announced a strategic partnership with JD.com, China’s second-largest e-commerce company. Also known as Jingdong, JD.com generated over US$55 billion in revenue last year and currently boasts over 300 million active users. The company is currently the biggest competitor to Jack Ma’s Alibaba.

When the region’s internet penetration rate started to grow in the mid-2000s, many users in Southeast Asia started yearning for their very own “Amazon”, an e-commerce site where they could simply place an order online and have their goods delivered to their doorstep. Fast forward to 2018, and their dreams have come true with Lazada. The popular e-commerce portal currently serves six markets in Southeast Asia with millions of users.

Jack Ma’s shopping spree is starting to weigh on Alibaba’s bottom line just as profit and revenue growth ease. And investors have shaved about $60 billion off its market value to voice their displeasure.Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is projected to post its first decline in profit in a year and a half – the result of folding in major loss-making businesses and heightened spending to fend off a charge by Tencent Holdings Ltd. into retail and payments – traditionally its turf.

Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba has entered into a strategic partnership with the Thai government. It is representative of the growing collaboration between Alibaba and the Thai government. Two years prior, the duo signed a Letter of Intent, which established the foundation for joint efforts to boost the capacity of Thai entrepreneurs in gaining access to new markets and capitalising on digital innovations.

SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese technology giant, used its stake in online retailer Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. as collateral for an US$8 billion loan from a group of banks in what is one of the biggest deals of its kind, according to people familiar with the matter.Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd recently announced that they will invest an additional US$2 billion into the Lazada Group. It is believed that this move by Alibaba is to counter Amazon’s plans of expanding its market to this region which has over 600 million potential customers. The American e-commerce giant officially launched a membership programme named Prime in Singapore in December, 2017.

The era of traditional microprocessor powered computing that has shaped our lives in many different ways is coming to an end. The future lies in quantum computing technology.Researchers at New York based multinational technology firm IBM, believe that quantum computers will be a mainstream presence in our lives in five years. According to American financial services provider, Morgan Stanley, the quantum computing market is slated to be worth US$10 billion in the next decade.