In brief: Grab partners with SP on electric cars; Australia bans Huawei

Photo credit: Grab

Grab in tie-up with SP Group to expand electric fleet (Singapore). The ride-hailing company is adding 200 new electric vehicles early 2019 as part of a strategic partnership with Singaporean utilities provider SP Group, which is building a network of fast-charging points in the city-state. Grab claims that driver-partners who join the scheme can earn as much as 25 percent more in daily income. (Grab)

Huawei hit by ban Down Under (China/Australia). The Australian government has banned the Chinese telecom giant from selling 5G-enabled equipment in the country as it seeks to update its wireless infrastructure. According to a Huawei statement on Twitter, its rival ZTE is also under the same embargo in Australia. (CNN)

Other news

Alibaba joins hands with Paytm to offer cloud infrastructure (India/China). The Chinese titan is licensing its cloud-related technology to the Indian payments firm. Data held by the service will stay within India, in compliance with a new regulation requiring payments companies to store customer data locally. (The Times of India)

Pinduoduo sweeps out millions of listings amid counterfeit crackdown (China). The ecommerce player has taken down 4.8 million listings and shuttered more than 1,000 stores following a public outcry and government scrutiny over fake goods on its platform. Tencent-backed Pinduoduo went public in the US last month. (South China Morning Post)

KoinWorks pockets US$16.5 million to build new technologies (Indonesia). The peer-to-peer lending startup raised the series A funding from lead investor Mandiri Capital Indonesia, the VC arm of Bank Mandiri. Local conglomerate Gunung Sewu and Convergence Ventures also participated. (DealStreetAsia)

Cryptocurrency trading company brings total raised to US$1.63 million (Singapore). Aly, the parent company behind the stock and cryptocurrency tracking app Spiking, has closed its pre-series A round with US$880,000 in funding. The cash injection will be used to set up new monetization channels for Spiking. (Aly)

Meitu shares plummet 19 percent after disappointing earnings (China). The selfie app saw its monthly active users slide to 350 million, representing a 16 percent drop from the end of last year. It attributes the poor performance to tougher competition and “one-off” incidents, such as a download suspension on app stores. (Bloomberg)

Bahasa.ai nets undisclosed seed funding from East Ventures (Indonesia). The startup will spend the new capital to continue building its natural language processing and understanding engine for the Indonesian language. (Bahasa.ai)

World Bank offers world’s first public blockchain bond (Australia). Called the Bondi, the instrument is managed by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and is supposedly the first bond to be built and managed solely on the blockchain. While Russian telecoms operator MTS claimed to have built the world’s first blockchain-based bond earlier this year, the deal was privately placed. In comparison, the Bondi is being offered for public auction. (Reuters)

OCBC kicks off investment robo-advisor (Singapore). The bank claims to be the first in Southeast Asia to launch a robo-advisor for its customers. The automated investment service – which was trialed in partnership with Singaporean startup WeInvest last year – lets users choose from 28 portfolios across six markets. (OCBC)

See: Previous Asia tech news