The stock ended the day up +5%. The company - whose app offers consumer services including lunch reservations, buying movie tickets, booking vacations and hailing car rides -  raised $4.2 billion from its IPO, pricing its shares near the top of its target range.Thursday’s trade valued the company at about $50 billion. Formed in 2015 by the merger of two smaller companies Meituan and Dianping, the company is seen as a potential competitor to Chinese tech giant Alibaba and ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing.

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma might have turned skeptical about his promise to create 1 million US jobs, as U.S.-China trade tensions keep escalating. Last year, Jack Ma was eager to help American small businesses to sell their products to Chinese customers via Alibaba’s platform – a move he expected would boost jobs in the U.S.But given the intensifying US.-China trade wars in recent times,  Ma seems unsure about following up on his earlier promise. "This promise was on the basis of friendly China-US cooperation and reasonable bilateral trade relations, but the current situation has already destroyed that basis," Ma said in an interview published late Wednesday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.

European Union antitrust regulators are looking into whether or not Amazon has milked smaller retailers’ data to boost its own sales. Such data might include information on consumer preferences, the kind of offers people are liking and other factors that incentivize people to buy things." The EU has, in recent times, been keeping tech companies on a tight leash over their use of data and their compliance with industry competition rules.

Amazon is reportedly investigating charges that some of its employees are peddling confirdential data. A Wall Street Journal article alleged that the e-commerce giant's staff members are disclosing customer data (such as reviewer email addresses) to merchants/independent sellers and deleting negative reviews on products in exchange for money - something that  can potentially allow merchants to increase their product rankings or sales.Brokers for Amazon employees in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen leaked internal data to independent sellers for payments of between $80 and $2,000, according to the Journal report. An Amazon spokesperson told CNN it has "sophisticated systems to restrict and audit access to information," while adding that the company is investigating into the matter and would take action if anyone has violated the rules.  

Amazon said that its business-to-business operation has generated an annualized $10 billion in revenues globally. Launched in the U.S. in 2015, Amazon Business has schools, hospitals, factories, local governments and more than half of Fortune 100 companies as its users/customers.Outside the U.S., Amazon Business spans over several countries including Germany, Japan and India. Merchants pay a commission to Amazon on each sale.

Alibaba has inked a deal with the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Mail.ru to form a joint venture worth $2 billion. Alibaba will fold its domestic operation of Tmall and AliExpress into the venture  called AliExpress Russia, while MegaFon PJSC will sell its 10 percent stake in Mail.ru to Alibaba in exchange for 24% of the venture.The Russian Direct Investment Fund will contribute an unspecified amount in return for a 13 percent stake. The joint venture seems to be a critical consumer business strategy, as it potentially connects  Mail.ru’s consumer services - spanning online food delivery, e-retail in Chinese goods and ride-hailing services - with Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplace platform AliExpress.    

Jack Ma announced that he’ll retire as executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.in 2019, and that he will be succeeded by CEO Daniel Zhang. Zhang, who became chief executive officer three years ago, is a certified accountant and a major force behind Alibaba’s ‘New Retail’ technology –  touted as a revolutionary shift in retail industry encompassing digital shopping, physical stores, e-payments and logistics.Zhang also led mega shopping bonanza events such as the annual Singles' Day .The company’s stock has grown +87% during Zhang’s tenure.  

Amazon is seeking to bolster its India presence, by offering Hindi language features. On Tuesday, the company launched a version of its mobile website and Android app in Hindi – the most popular language among Indians.It is still working to develop features such as product reviews and ratings in Hindi. However, Hindi is not yet available on Amazon's iOS app or the desktop version of its website.

Google Home is used by 30% of U.S. smart speaker owners each month. Google started working on its language identification tool, LangID, in 2013.Google’s latest bilingual offering will be operative by Thursday, starting with  English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.

In the three months ending June, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s revenues surged +61% - the fastest pace in  more than four years. The Chinese e-commerce giant’s revenues for the quarter was 80.9 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) which matched analyst estimates.Its net income – though dropped by -41% – still managed to come in at 8.7 billion yuan, topping estimates.  Buying a department store chain with 29 stores and 17 shopping malls last year, expanding Hema supermarket chain, increasing investments on data-centers for its cloud computing business,  acquiring food delivery network Ele.me and video streaming site Youku  – Alibaba’s  aggressive investment/expansion strategies seem to be boosting revenues, while a part of it might be hurting margins. 

KPMG, one of the world’s biggest tax advisory and auditing firms, released their twice-yearly “The Pulse of Fintech” report on July 31.It offered a rosy outlook for the space, revealing a significant uptick in venture capital, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions deals through Q1 and Q2 2018 on a level that already exceeds 2017’s overall totals. Two massive deals accounted for the healthy growth: Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Financial raised $14 billion during Q2, while Vantiv acquired WorldPay for $12.9 billion in Q1.

Blue Apron Inc. lowered its sales forecast and reported a slide in its customer count. In Q2 2018, the meal-kit company’s customers declined by -24%, causing revenues to drop -25%.Blue Apron expects Q3 revenues in the range of $150 million to $160 million - which would be a -24% decline from the year-ago period.  

Touted as ‘Amazon Prime Day’, the e-commerce giant’s massive discount event apparently saw several shoppers frustrated by technical faults on its website and app. In addition to speed bumps on shopping (mainly in the first hour of the event day that started at 3 P.M Eastern time Monday), customers also faced troubles streaming content on Amazon Prime Video and connecting to AI voice assistant Alexa – as indicated by user reports on DownDetector.com.Many people took to social media and tagged the event as “#PrimeDayFail”. The technical hiccups, however, could not stop this year’s Prime Day from outshining last year’s event.

technologies, the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba is set to invest $15 billion over the next three years into quantum computing and A.I.The algorithms on Tickeron are able to scan the stock market in search of patterns and trends, and then can use back-testing to determine statistical probabilities of outcomes that investors can use to make trading decisions.