A delivery worker for Alibaba's Hema Fresh chain rides his electric bicycle on a road following an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei. Few in tech offer as broad a glimpse into business under the epidemic than Alibaba. The company initially benefited from a surge in online shopping from millions confined by the largest work-from-home undertaking in history. Yet, it turns out, a lot of the millions of packages that get delivered every day are cheap items such as groceries and face masks. — Reuters
The coronavirus epidemic is exposing the dichotomy of the world’s second largest tech economy. Chinese businesses like Alibaba and Meituan with outsized footprints in the material world are rushing to contain the fallout while virtual denizens ByteDance Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd ride a surge in social media and entertainment.
It boils down to the difference between hawking analogue and digital wares. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Meituan Dianping have shed US$28bil (RM118.17bil) of market value since Covid-19 erupted in central China in January because they depend on millions of people and trucks to ferry packages and meals through an increasingly tangled nationwide transport network. WeChat operator Tencent, which flogs virtual goods like costumes and armour in mobile games or sprinkles advertising online, has gained about US$18bil (RM75.96bil). Its market value now hovers around half a trillion dollars.
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