Chinese regulators summon top e-commerce platforms...China rare-earth magnet shipments jump in June...Baidu teams up with Uber for robotaxis

Chinese regulators summon top e-commerce platforms

China’s market regulator has summoned three of the country’s top e-commerce platforms—Meituan, JD.com and Alibaba Group-backed Ele.me—in a bid to cool an escalating price war driven by aggressive subsidies, reports Caixin. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) issued a statement late Friday demanding the companies adhere to fair competition rules and engage in rational market behavior.

The warning is part of a broader crackdown on what regulators term “involution-style competition”—a cycle of unsustainable discounting that has distorted the market and weakened the industry’s overall health.

At the heart of the regulatory concern is the country’s rapidly growing “instant retail” sector, in which platforms battle to deliver everything from lunch to electronics within an hour. Although the sector has seen record-breaking order volumes, it is also facing mounting costs, shrinking profit margins and growing concerns over worker exploitation and food waste.

China rare-earth magnet shipments jump in June

China boosted shipments of rare earth magnets in June—including to the US—after a global supply squeeze that threatened factory closures and inflamed trade tensions, reports Bloomberg. Total cargoes of the magnets rose to 3,188 tons last month, according to Chinese data on Sunday, more than double volumes of 1,238 tons in May in the midst of China’s curbs. Flows to the US alone rose to 353 tons, up from just 46 tons. Total shipments were still substantially lower than before Beijing launched export controls in early April.

China put restrictions on seven of 17 rare earth elements, which also extended to the powerful magnets used in high-tech manufacturing from electric vehicles to smartphones and fighter jets. That threatened deep disruptions to US industry and encouraged US President Donald Trump to agree a trade truce.

After trade negotiators struck an agreement in June in Geneva to ease tensions, Trump said China had agreed to fully supply rare earths and magnets. On July 1, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said flows of magnets from China had picked up but were still not going fast enough.

Baidu teams up with Uber for robotaxis

China’s autonomous vehicle companies are ramping up global expansion amid mounting commercial hurdles at home, reports Caixin. Among the latest deals is Baidu Inc. teaming up with Uber Technologies Inc. to roll out the Chinese tech giant’s Apollo Go robotaxis in Asia and the Middle East later this year, the companies announced on Tuesday.

The deployment is part of a “multi-year strategic partnership to deploy thousands of Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the Uber platform across multiple global markets outside of the U.S. and mainland China,” the companies said in a press release.

The partnership marks Baidu’s entry on a growing list of Chinese self-driving startups joining forces with Uber, including WeRide Inc., Momenta and Pony.ai Inc. For Uber, the move continues its strategy of partnering with external developers of autonomous driving systems after abandoning its own costly self-driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group, in 2020.

China expands Shanghai port

Already the world’s busiest shipping port, China’s financial centre Shanghai is now positioning itself as a world-class shipbuilding hub, with an eye on high-value models such as those designed to transport liquefied natural gas (LNG) and containers, reports the South China Morning Post. The Shanghai municipal government has unveiled plans to augment its shipyards on Changxing Island, situated across the southern mouth of the Yangtze River and near the Yangshan Deep-Water Port. The Yangshan facility, a component of the Port of Shanghai, holds sea trials for large vessels.

Hi-tech ships such as LNG carriers and dual-fuel container ships are set to make up 80% of the industrial base’s output, according to a document released on Wednesday.

The cluster will reach an industrial scale of over RMB 120 billion ($16.71 billion) within three years, the government estimated.

Beijing stock exchange becomes IPO hub

The tiny Beijing stock exchange is attracting more companies hoping to list this year than China’s two dominant mainland markets combined, as the previously overlooked venue benefits from investors’ renewed appetite for small-cap technology stocks, reports the Financial Times. Established by Chinese leader Xi Jinping in September 2021, the exchange was for several years regarded as something of a joke by investors, with a market capitalisation of just $118 billion, compared with a total of about $17 trillion across Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

But it has received 113 applications for initial public offerings in 2025, according to data provider Wind, more than Shanghai and Shenzhen put together. The Beijing exchange’s BSE 50 index has also risen 37.6% this year, compared with 2.5% for the country’s benchmark CSI 300.

The boom in applications has been driven by looser listing requirements than for China’s other exchanges and renewed interest in the country’s microcap technology stocks following the huge impact of AI sensation DeepSeek.

Cut it out

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has summoned three of the country’s top e-commerce platforms—Meituan, JD.com and Alibaba Group-backed Ele.me—in a bid to cool an escalating price war driven by aggressive subsidies. SAMR issued a statement on Friday demanding the companies adhere to fair competition rules and engage in rational market behavior, a warning that is part of a broader crackdown on what regulators are calling “involution-style competition.”

Simply put, it is deflation. But there is a reluctance from the government to use the term, and it appears that they are attempting to shift the perception of this reality to meet the requirements of the system. Consumers aren’t spending and discounts cannot continue forever, and even at this point suppliers are suffering and workers are ending up unemployed. For the companies, this battle to the death for market share is unhealthy and will inevitably result in a monopoly that re-raises prices, which consumers may be unwilling to pay.

Some of the discounts are also being driven by government subsidies and it feels like a game of whack-a-mole with short-term fix after short-term fix. There must be those within the system that understand that this is not going to help the ailing economy in the long term, but the real fixes of a regulated market subject to market forces, a re-division of assets in the economy and less state involvement in the market, are not the way it wants to go.