Citi Says ‘Good Time' to Accumulate Chinese Property Stocks
'We reckon it is a good time to accumulate China property sector over a two-year horizon, with ongoing return-on-equity improvement on asset turn and pricing,' analysts Griffin Chan and Cindy Li wrote in a Wednesday note.
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Business Insider
36 minutes ago
- Business Insider
China's upstart planemaker hails 'breakthrough' in its plan to take on Boeing and Airbus
China's first homegrown passenger jet is picking up steam as the planemaker Comac builds a foothold to compete with aviation's big players. The Comac C909 is designed for regional journeys, with a capacity between 78 and 90 seats. That makes it smaller than any jet currently produced by Airbus or Boeing, instead likelier to compete with those built by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer. It attracts less attention than the larger C919 — a similar model to the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 — but is still a key part of Comac's ambitions. As Saturday marked nine years since the C909's maiden flight, China's official state news agency Xinhua interviewed the jet's chief designer, Chen Yong. He called it "a pioneer in my country's commercial aircraft field," adding that it achieved "a breakthrough" by being China's first commercial aircraft. Tuesday then saw flag carrier Air China launch its first international service with the C909. A water-cannon salute greeted the plane as it landed in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar after a 90-minute journey from Hohhot, in China's north. "We look forward to it continuing to write the pride of domestic aircraft in the future," the airline said in a post on Weibo. That came after Lao Airlines, the flag carrier of Laos, leased two C909s from Comac and started operations in April, Xinhua reported. Later that month, Vietnam's VietJet also leased two of the jets from Chengdu Airlines, launching daily flights between Ho Chi Minh City and the nearby Con Dao archipelago. These are promising developments for the small jet, which Comac renamed from the ARJ21 last November, unifying its brand in a sign of growing ambitions. However, only 166 such planes have been delivered, Chen said. The plane also looks very similar to the McDonnell Douglas MD-80. One of Comac's predecessor companies partnered with the American planemaker in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Comac has faced allegations of corporate espionage over the C919. In 2022, a Chinese intelligence officer, Yanjun Xu, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a US jury found him guilty of trying to steal technology related to GE Aviation's engines. The aviation industry remains divided on Comac's chances of competing with the likes of Boeing and Airbus. "Comac is years away from being certified outside China … It's going to be a very limited market for quite some time," John Schmidt, Accenture's aerospace and defense lead, told Business Insider in an interview at last month's Paris Air Show. Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said in February that the sector could go "from a duopoly to a potential triopoly." He added that Comac was more likely to succeed thanks to its "privileged access" to the Chinese market, which accounts for a fifth of global aircraft demand.
Axios
an hour ago
- Axios
Behind the Curtain: Zuck's AI moonshot
Mark Zuckerberg — in an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar talent raid — has dramatically reset the market for blue-chip AI builders, and further complicated the government's ability to stack its own technology bench. Why it matters: The Meta CEO is trying to lure talent from OpenAI and other tech companies with offers that can top $100 million in total compensation for the first year alone — beyond most star athletes' pay. Top-tier pay packages being offered by Meta for AI researchers can reach up to $300 million over four years, WIRED reports. A tech-news feed on X used a baseball card motif to portray an OpenAI researcher being "TRADED" to Meta. The talent derby has sent compensation soaring across AI, as rivals scramble to keep top talent and entice others not to flirt with Meta and other suitors. It's partly a continuation of an ongoing recruiting war — OpenAI built its lab with the help of some massive comp packages. Zuckerberg unveiled his dream team this week as Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), after meeting personally with potential recruits at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. The big picture: America has witnessed staggering valuations for startups. But never before have we seen company-valuation-sized salaries for people, rather than ideas or enterprises. That's injecting a new layer of drama and next-level economics for the biggest companies — many the size of nation-states — racing to win the AI wars. Collateral damage: The U.S. government is already struggling to recruit top researchers and scientists. A remotely talented AI specialist can now assume that riches in the tens of millions are attainable. So why sacrifice to serve in government? China, by contrast, can command top talent to work on government projects. A front-page Wall Street Journal story on Wednesday, "China Is Quickly Eroding America's Lead in the Global AI Race," said AI models from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Alibaba, are becoming popular in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Zoom in: Zuckerberg's biggest single bet was investing $14 billion in Scale AI, and bringing co-founder Alex Wang to Meta as chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will lead Meta's work on AI products and applied research. Eleven other new AI star hires were listed in Zuckerberg's internal memo announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs. Altman hit back at Zuckerberg's spree this week, telling OpenAI researchers in a Slack message that Meta "has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list," WIRED reports. "I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries," Altman added. "Missionaries will beat mercenaries." Between the lines: Tech investors tell us that until very recently, the revenue outlook for AI models was unclear, and there was a debate about the return on capital spending. Now it's apparent that leading AI companies will do hundreds of billions in revenue per year. OpenAI is enjoying rampaging growth: The company said last month that it has $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, just 2½ years after the launch of ChatGPT — up from $5.5 billion last year. OpenAI has projected for investors that, fueled by AI agents and other new products, sales could total as much as $125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion in 2030, according to documents seen by The Information. Anthropic — a rival AI company led by Dario Amodei, an OpenAI alumnus — has hit a pace of $4 billion in revenue annually, up almost four times from January, The Information reported this week. At those rates of growth, you can see what Zuckerberg is seeing — and why he's suddenly pouring massive spending into making sure Meta remains a dominant AI player. The backstory: Zuckerberg is repeating a winning playbook. By 2012, he realized Facebook was behind on the mobile web. He famously redirected the entire company toward catching up. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and later WhatsApp for $16 billion — racing ahead in areas where others had innovated. But this time he's betting on individuals, rather than successful enterprises. Reality check: Meta has spent a fortune on Llama, its large-language model (LLM), in an effort to develop a frontier model that can compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. In a splashy story about " The List" of AI geniuses Zuckerberg is courting, the Wall Street Journal said Meta's "laggard history in generative AI has made some recruits hesitant." Bubbles can burst. AI salaries and data-center costs won't be sustainable without the ultimate payoff being unimaginably huge. And the more these companies spend, the bigger that payoff needs to be. As uncovered by a survey Axios reported last month, many small businesses using AI aren't even paying for it. The other side: Altman, noting that OpenAI has built "a culture that is good at repeatable innovation," said last month on a podcast hosted by Jack Altman, his younger brother, that Meta was making "giant offers to a lot of people on our team — like $100 million signing bonuses" and more than that in annual compensation. "We're set up such that if we succeed ... then everybody will do great financially," Sam Altman said. "[I]t's incentive-aligned with mission-first, and then economic rewards and everything else flowing from that." The bottom line: The bidding war is the most public manifestation of the secret race among AI giants — all betting that the technology will bring trillions of dollars in productivity gains. For them, the timeline is the biggest question.
Bloomberg
an hour ago
- Bloomberg
The Man Tasked With Ending Citigroup's Fat-Finger Blunders
Just before Citigroup Inc. 's tech chief faced his first global town hall meeting, he got some pointed advice from his teenager: Make sure the technology works. That hasn't always been a given at Citigroup.
