Overview
1. China's Foreign Trade Volume Exceeded CNY 20 Tn in First Half of the Year
2. CreativeFitting Completes Multi-Million-Dollar Pre-A++ Round of Financing
3. JD.com Makes Acquisition Offer to European Consumer Electronics Retailer CECONOMY
4. Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon Released Earnings Reports, All Surpassing Expectations
5. BYD ATTO 2 Officially Launches in Malaysia
6. BYD's Cumulative Overseas Sales of Passenger Vehicles and Pickup Trucks Reach 470,000 Units in First Half of the Year
7. WeRide Robotaxi Secures Autonomous Driving Permit in Saudi Arabia
8. WeRide and Uber Expand Robotaxi Operation Scope in Abu Dhabi, with Expected Doubling of Orders
9. WeRide's Q2 Revenue Reaches CNY 127 Mn, Up Over 60% Year-on-Year
Event Highlights & Commentary
1. China's Foreign Trade Volume Exceeded CNY 20 Tn in First Half of the Year
【Event】The latest data released by General Administration of Customs, P. R. China shows that from January to June 2025, the total import and export value of China's goods trade exceeded CNY 20 trillion for the first time in the first half of a year, hitting a new high for the same period in history, demonstrating the strong resilience of China's economy.
Among them, imports and exports to African and Central and Eastern European countries performed particularly prominently, becoming an important engine driving growth.
Focusing on the African market, in the first half of the year, China-Africa trade volume increased by 14.4% year-on-year, with exports to Africa growing by as high as 23.0%, leading major global markets. The significant growth in China-Africa trade is mainly due to the remarkable upgrading of consumption structure in emerging economies such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, which have a strong demand for high-value-added "Made in China" products like electric vehicles and photovoltaic products. In addition, the synergy between policies and industries is another major driver for the development of China-Africa trade: China's policy of implementing zero-tariff treatment for all 53 African countries that have diplomatic relations with China has facilitated African agricultural products' access to the Chinese market; while optimized cross-border payment has ensured the security of trade funds. At the same time, the China-Africa industrial cooperation model is shifting from commodity exports to localized production. The accelerated implementation of localized projects such as Nigeria's photovoltaic production lines and Tanzania's large-scale rapeseed oil factories marks the deepening of China-Africa cooperation.
Turning to the Central and Eastern European market, in the first half of the year, trade volume between China and 17 Central and Eastern European countries reached CNY 522.88 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.8%, with the trade index hitting a record high in June. The breakthrough in China-Central and Eastern Europe trade volume is mainly driven by China's diversified market layout strategy and the continuous upgrading of bilateral trade structure. When traditional European and American markets fluctuated due to tariff policy changes, China continued to deepen the "China-Central and Eastern European Countries Cooperation Mechanism," and has established over 20 cooperation platforms in professional fields covering the entire industrial chain including agriculture, energy, technology, and culture, achieving remarkable results in the market diversification strategy. In addition, the bilateral trade structure is continuously upgrading, mainly reflected in the significant increase in the proportion of mechanical and electrical products and high-tech products, and the decrease in the proportion of labor-intensive products. The upgrading of the trade structure not only meets the needs of domestic consumption upgrading but also helps Central and Eastern European countries avoid excessive dependence on trade with Russia and Europe.
Against the backdrop of complex and changing global economy, China's foreign trade scale has hit a new high. The outstanding performance of African and Central and Eastern European markets has strongly confirmed the success of deepened "Belt and Road" cooperation and market diversification strategy, injecting stable momentum into global trade.
2. CreativeFitting Completes Multi-Million-Dollar Pre-A++ Round of Financing
【Event】Recently, Chinese AI short drama platform CreativeFitting announced the completion of a multi-million-dollar Pre-A++ round of financing, led by existing shareholder Unity Ventures. Leveraging its self-developed AI short drama creation platform, the company has gathered a group of AI short drama creators and launched Reel.AI, the world's first AI short drama app. Its current ARR has exceeded USD 10 million.
Founded in 2021, CreativeFitting is a service provider focusing on commercial content creation, dedicated to developing self-developed AIGC video generation models to produce high-quality content. In its AI short drama business, the company currently has two core modules: VFS, an AI short drama creation tool (providing creation support for AI directors), and Reel.AI, an AI short drama distribution channel (offering content consumption scenarios for users). Over its four years of establishment, the company has grown rapidly, starting with generating short advertising videos and now independently producing AI short dramas. Previously, the urban romantic light comedy After Divorce: My Five Brothers Paved My Way to the Billionaire Throne (abbreviated as Five Brothers), created using AI short drama generation tools provided by Jingying Technology, made it to overseas micro-short drama box office rankings, generating substantial revenue. This verified the large-scale commercial value potential of AI short dramas and strongly demonstrated the development potential of the industry.
Compared with traditional short dramas, AI-produced short dramas show significant advantages. First, AI short dramas have a huge edge in cost control, saving up to 80% of production expenses, such as venue rental, equipment purchase, and salaries for actors and staff. Second, AI has greatly liberated creative productivity, allowing directors to free themselves from tedious non-creative tasks like fund coordination and team management, thus focusing more on core creative work. Third, the operation mode is more flexible: AI short dramas can be produced and serialized while adjusting content and subsequent investment in real-time based on market feedback. This "trial-and-adjust" approach significantly reduces risks compared to the traditional model, where dramas must be fully filmed before release, and costs are entirely lost if the audience does not respond positively. Finally, AI is more groundbreaking in content creation, capable of breaking through traditional subject restrictions (for example, expanding from common urban romance to broader fields like science fiction, fantasy, and mythical fantasy) to better meet the audience's expectations for content quality and freshness, thereby effectively increasing their willingness to pay. In the future, as more enterprises increase investment in the AI short drama track, the industry is expected to develop rapidly at the technical level, and the industry ecology will be further reshaped.
3. JD.com Makes Acquisition Offer to European Consumer Electronics Retailer CECONOMY
【Event】On July 31, Chinese self-operated e-commerce enterprises JD.com issued an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, stating that it will acquire Germany's largest consumer electronics group CECONOMY through its wholly-owned indirect subsidiary, with a valuation of approximately EUR 2.2 billion (equivalent to over CNY 18 billion).
CECONOMY is a leading German consumer electronics retailer founded in 2017. It was formerly the consumer electronics business segment of German retail giant Metro AG and became an independent company after being spun off and listed in 2017. Currently, the group operates over 1,000 stores in 12 European countries. Its core brands MediaMarkt and Saturn hold a market share of over 30% in Germany, and it has built a comprehensive retail ecosystem through its after-sales service brand Deutsche Technikberatung. However, with the rise of e-commerce platforms like Amazon, CECONOMY, which focuses on offline retail, has faced certain impacts. Despite its active promotion of digital transformation and launch of online platforms, its market share has failed to replicate the strong performance it achieved during the era of physical stores.
For this acquisition, JD.com's main goal is to leverage CECONOMY's mature offline channel network to bypass Europe's complex distribution system, quickly enter the European retail market, and exchange capital for time and space for market expansion. Previously, Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD.com, stated that the European infrastructure JD.com has been building for three years will be completed by the end of this year and officially put into operation in 2026. It is reported that JD.com will adopt a model of "local e-commerce, local teams, local procurement, and local delivery" in Europe. Currently, it has already provided "one-hour delivery" services in the Netherlands, Poland and other countries. Obviously, JD.com's overseas expansion path differs from that of companies like Temu and Shein, which adopt a light-asset platform-based expansion model and rely on traffic and algorithms to develop markets. Instead, JD.com has chosen a combination of self-built infrastructure and local mergers and acquisitions, investing more assets overseas and building competitive barriers through the offline "experience + service" model to avoid simple and unsustainable price wars.
In addition, CECONOMY's stores and warehouses can serve as "front warehouses" for JD.com's e-commerce business, complementing JD.com's international supply chain and alleviating issues such as slow cross-border logistics and high costs. By integrating CECONOMY's physical retail network, JD.com is expected to build an online-offline collaborative system and further strengthen its local supply chain capabilities.
4. Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon Released Earnings Reports, All Surpassing Expectations
【Event】On July 31, Microsoft and Meta respectively released their latest quarterly earnings reports, with both performances far exceeding market expectations.
For Microsoft, its revenue in the fourth fiscal quarter of fiscal year 2025 reached USD 76.44 billion, a year-on-year increase of 18%, significantly higher than the market expectation of USD 73.8 billion; net profit stood at USD 27.333 billion, a year-on-year increase of 24%. The performance growth was mainly driven by its intelligent cloud business, with Azure and other cloud services revenue growing by 39%—the highest growth rate in two and a half years. Driven by this, server products and cloud services revenue increased by 27%. In addition, Microsoft disclosed for the first time that Azure's annual revenue exceeded USD 75 billion, a year-on-year increase of 34%. After the earnings report was released, Microsoft's stock price surged 8% in after-hours trading, becoming the second company with a market value exceeding USD 4 trillion after NVIDIA.
Meta also delivered strong results. Its second-quarter revenue was USD 47.52 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22%, higher than the market expectation of USD 44.8 billion; net profit reached USD 18.34 billion, a year-on-year surge of 36%. Meta attributed performance improvement to efficiency gains from AI in its ad system, which drove a 9% increase in average advertising prices. After the earnings report was released, Meta's stock price soared more than 11% in pre-market trading.
In the early morning of August 1, Apple and Amazon also released their earnings reports one after another. In the third fiscal quarter of fiscal year 2025 ending June 28, Apple's total revenue was USD 94.04 billion, a year-on-year increase of 10%, the largest increase since December 2021; net profit was USD 24.43 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9%. Revenue from the core iPhone business was USD 44.58 billion, a year-on-year increase of 13%, far higher than the market expectation of USD 40.22 billion; revenue from the Mac business was USD 8.05 billion, a year-on-year increase of nearly 15%, performing impressively. Notably, Apple's revenue in the Greater China region rebounded, with total revenue from the region reaching USD 15.37 billion in the quarter, a year-on-year increase of 4%, reversing the declines of 2% and 11% in the previous two quarters respectively. Cook said that consumer subsidies in some parts of China had significantly boosted sales of the company's products. After the earnings report was announced, Apple's stock price rose more than 3% in after-hours trading.
Amazon's second-quarter revenue and profits also exceeded market expectations. In the quarter, its net sales reached USD 167.7 billion, up 13% year-on-year; net profit rose to USD 18.2 billion from USD 13.5 billion in the same period last year, a year-on-year increase of 35%. The North America segment and International segment delivered outstanding performances, with operating profits surging 48% and 448% respectively, demonstrating Amazon's ability to withstand risks amid the complex environment in the second quarter, such as escalating uncertainties in global trade policies and tariff impacts. However, its AWS business underperformed expectations, with operating profit of USD 10.2 billion, lower than the market forecast of USD 10.9 billion; the profit margin stood at 32.9%, down from 39.5% in the first quarter of this year and 35.5% in the same period last year. The slowdown in the growth of AWS, the cloud business, which also lags behind competitors like Microsoft and Google, has triggered market concerns, leading to a more than 7% drop in Amazon's stock price in after-hours trading.