Alibaba’s flash sale losses are shrinking faster than anyone expected in Q1
NUPIAO got the inside scoop on July 8: Alibaba’s 2027 fiscal year Q1 preview shows e-commerce profits holding steady and bouncing back. The Taobao flash sale business is slashing losses way quicker than the market anticipated, and the gap between its unit economics and those of competitors is closing fast. Even while pulling back on subsidies, the unit has managed to keep its market share rock-solid. Now the focus is shifting toward high-ticket restaurant and non-food orders, which means the unit economics should keep getting better from here.
ZTE’s globe-first AI agent phone is set to debut at WAIC 2026
On July 8, according to Blue Whale News, insiders revealed that the world’s very first AI agent smartphone from ZTE’s Nubia brand is likely to make its official debut at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
After the “770,000 unread messages” fiasco, WeCom urgently rolls out a group-join confirmation feature
Recently, a story about an 88-year-old whose phone had 770,000 unread messages went viral, sparking a huge debate about digital rights for the elderly. It also shone a harsh spotlight on WeCom’s long-standing “silent group adding” rule.
On July 7, WeCom’s official team posted an announcement titled “On Curbing Excessive Marketing and Improving the Online Environment for Seniors,” declaring a big change to its group invite controls. For enterprise accounts with abnormal behavior, the new rule now requires the person being added to a group to confirm before they’re actually pulled in. That’s on top of a bunch of other cleanup measures.
According to the statement, WeCom is rolling out four targeted fixes. First, they’re tightening group invite controls — for accounts with high group-quit rates or weird behavior, the “invitee must confirm” function is now live, so you won’t end up in random groups anymore. Second, they’re capping how often you can create groups; if an enterprise adds people too aggressively or sees too many people leaving, its group-creating ability gets limited. Third, they’re cracking down harder on third-party tools used for mass messaging and message bombing. And fourth, they’re teaming up with WeChat’s security squad to spot and ban accounts that over-market to elderly users.
Apple and Broadcom ink a massive $30 billion+ deal to boost US chip manufacturing
On July 8, Apple announced a multi-year partnership with Broadcom, totaling over $30 billion, to co-design and produce custom chips and advanced wireless tech for a bunch of Apple products. Under the deal, Broadcom will manufacture more than 15 billion chips in the US and invest $1.5 billion to expand its Fort Collins, Colorado fab, cranking out advanced RF components like FBAR filters and wireless connectivity tech.
Apple says this is its biggest “Made in America” project yet, and it’s part of that $600 billion pledge to invest in the US economy over the next four years — all aimed at building up the domestic semiconductor supply chain and creating jobs.
Nearly 50,000 Samsung employees split a $1.5 billion “gift”
On the evening of July 7, Samsung Electronics disclosed a board resolution in South Korea’s DART system, setting aside 1.0834 million treasury shares for employee stock compensation. The total value? A cool 344.5 billion won (about $1.536 billion RMB), covering close to 50,000 workers.
This round of stock rewards is aimed at the DX consumer electronics division and the CSS compound semiconductor business, with 49,345 eligible employees in total. Based on the July 6 closing price of 318,000 won per share, each person gets roughly 22 shares, worth about 7 million won (around 31,200 yuan).
Alipay’s “Tap” feature surpasses 400 million users
On July 8, Alipay announced that its “Tap” feature has now crossed 400 million users, with over 30 million offline touchpoints deployed and more than 2,300 ecosystem partners on board. Building on those 30 million physical points and their AI upgrade, Alipay plans to open up its Agent service network in a big way in 2026.
JPMorgan reiterates its “overweight” call on Samsung, says the dip is a golden buying opportunity
On July 8, JPMorgan dropped a new research note that gave Samsung’s strong preliminary Q2 2026 results a huge thumbs-up. They kept their “overweight” rating and bumped the December 2026 target price up to 480,000 won.
JPMorgan pointed out that even though Samsung took a massive one-time labor cost provision north of 15 trillion won in the first half, the Q2 actual earnings still managed to beat the already-lowered market expectations. The one-two punch of skyrocketing memory chip prices fueled by AI infrastructure buildout and a weaker won really showed off Samsung’s cyclical muscle.
The report stressed that after the recent pullback, Samsung’s shares are now trading at just 5.2 times forward 12-month earnings. JPMorgan called Samsung “the cheapest quality memory play on the planet,” and said the earlier market gloom has actually handed long-term investors a fantastic entry point to buy the dip.
Intel patent reveals a new XBM memory architecture
On July 8, a recently published Intel patent application showed off something called XBM (Cross-Batch Memory), a new high-bandwidth memory architecture. The idea is to ditch the expensive silicon interposer that HBM needs, use UCIe interconnects, and built-in redundancy repair to slash advanced packaging costs and break through the “memory wall” bottleneck in AI chips. The patent describes a BEOL (back-end-of-line) DRAM stacked design that keeps the package size similar to HBM4 but boosts scalability and supports defect repair to improve yields.
