Another day, another deal to widen the reach of Ant Financial, the fintech-focused Alibaba affiliate.

This week, Ant Financial announced that it is picking up HelloPay, the payments firm attached to Lazada, which Alibaba bought a major share in for $1 billion last year. HelloPay was founded in November 2014 by Lazada to develop payment services for its e-commerce business.

The deal is an entirely logical one, given the ownership chain, and it will see HelloPay become owned and operated by Ant Financial out of its Singapore office. Furthermore, HelloPay will be rebranded locally to Alipay Singapore, Alipay Malaysia, Alipay Indonesia and Alipay Philippines in its markets.

Ant Financial is best known for operating Alipay, China’s largest mobile payment service with 450 million users, alongside digital banking and financial services. This year it has embarked on a series of deals to extend its reach beyond China into other parts of Asia. Its recently set up a joint venture in Indonesia, and has made investments in Korea, and created similar alliances in the Philippines and Thailand. Ant Financial is also on the cusp of buying U.S.-based cross-border remittance Moneygram for $1.2 billion following a bid from rival payment operator Euronet.

Alibaba, meanwhile, is planting roots in Southeast Asia following last year’s Lazada investment. It recently announced plans for a cross-border e-commerce hub in Malaysia, and, as TechCrunch reported last month, it is in discussions to buy out the remainder of Lazada.

Featured Image: KYTan/Shutterstock

Xiaomi unveiled its newest flagship smartphone — the Mi 6 — today at an event in Beijing, having skipped Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s largest annual event where it announced the Mi5 last year.

There’s plenty at stake with this new device, given that Xiaomi suffered a sales slump last year with CEO Lei Jun admitting that the company has entered a transitional period after growing too fast.

So, what about the Mi 6?

Well, the first thing to note is that there are plenty of similarities to the iPhone 7, but price isn’t one of them. The entry model — featuring 64 GB of storage — comes in at 2499 RMB, that’s around $360, with a 128 GB option (2899 RMB, $420) and ceramic edition (2999 RMB, $435) completing the range. All three are far cheaper than iPhone equivalents, but, interestingly for Xiaomi, the range is more expensive that the company’s usual flagship prices.

The most obvious iPhone comparison is that there is no headphone jack on the Mi 6, just as Apple elected with last year’s iPhone 7. Whether the Chinese company is following the trend, or doing what makes sense for itself in this instance, that is already ammo for Xiaomi skeptics.

But that’s not all. In a further parallel, the 5.5-inch Mi 6 includes a 12-megapixel dual rear camera — à la the iPhone 7+ — which mixes a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens. Like the iPhone, the Mi 6 includes a bokeh-style photography option, alongside 10x digital zoom, 2x lossless zoom, and optical image stabilization (OIS) technology. Also on board is an under-glass fingerprint sensor on the front. Xiaomi shipped a similar sensor in the Mi5s Plus last September and, if you believe leaks reported this week, Apple may have similar plans for its next iPhone.

A sample photo of the Mi 6 ‘portrait’ mode supplied by Xiaomi

With the Mi 6, Xiaomi has bumped up its RAM to 6GB, the most it has ever offered in a smartphone. The device is powered by a Snapdragon 835 10nm processor with a 64-bit, octa-core CPU with a whopping 3350 mAh battery that the company said will last a day thanks to “optimization” controls built into its MIUI operating system. Xiaomi announced its own-designed processor in February but it isn’t present here. The chip — called the Surge S1 — made its debut in the Mi5c two months ago but it will take some fine-tuning before it is part of a flagship.

Visually, the device is a departure from the Mi5 with curved edges that Xiaomi said are made possible through its use of “four-sided 3D glass,” while there is a new silver color option that includes a mirrored finish and that rather fetching ceramic model. Other notable features include dual speakers for stereo audio, improved 2.2 dual Wi-Fi technology, and new screen options that include a new night display and reduce blue ray output.

The phone goes on sale from Mi.com and Mi Home Stores in China on April 28. An international expansion to “selected” markets will come later, Xiaomi said, although it didn’t provide specific dates for that.

Is this new package enough to regain ground that Xiaomi lost in China?

Xiaomi appears to be seeking a hailo effect with a new flagship that is packed full of tech which, on paper at least, compares favorable to the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S8. The company has always sold higher volumes with its lower priced phones — its Redmi range is priced around $150 — so expect the Mi 6 to be a mark in the sand for what its technology and manufacturing chops are capable of.

The challenge facing the company is tough. In 2016, rivals Huawei, Vivo and Oppo were among the challengers that rose up with competitively priced phones and strong offline distribution reach to knock Xiaomi off the number one perch for smartphones sales in China. Lei Jun has promised to bounce back and expand Xiaomi’s offline commerce efforts, while he intends to continue its ‘smart device’ ecosystem push to increase customer engagement and generate increased revenue. Indeed, the Xiaomi CEO recently likened his firm to U.S. retailer Costco rather than Apple, the latter being a common comparison made in previous years.

Overseas, it remains unclear how Xiaomi’s internationalization effort is going, particularly following the departure of Hugo Barra, who led the project but has since move on to Facebook. Xiaomi revealed it cleared $1 billion in revenue in India, its second largest market behind China, last year while Lei Jun added today that it ranks second in the country, but nothing has been said of its performance in the other 20-odd countries where its phones are sold.

Baidu is opening its self-driving vehicle platform in a bid to help drive the development of autonomous cars.

The Chinese internet giant today announced its Apollo project that will see its platform, including vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, opened to help others in the industry, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.

The initial target is to open the technologies up for vehicles in restricted environments this July. Baidu said it then plans to share technology for simple urban road conditions before the end of the year, with the ultimate goal of opening its full tech stack — covering fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways and open city roads — by 2020.

“AI has great potential to drive social development, and one of AI’s biggest opportunities is intelligent vehicles,” Qi Lu, the former Microsoft exec who recently became Baidu group president and COO, said in a statement.

Beyond offering up its platform and technologies, which the company has invested significant sums into, Baidu said it is also looking to add partners to the program to strengthen it, particularly around compatible vehicles, sensors, and other components. Baidu has partnerships with Chinese companies such as BAIC Motor, BYD and Chery, while a two-year relationship with BMW petered out last year over apparent differences in strategy.

This move to open source much of its self-driving tech seems like a move to gain a leg-up on more developed competitors such as Google and Tesla.

Baidu was one of the first major tech companies to embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its autonomous vehicle push began with road testing in Beijing in 2015. Last November, it offered test rides to attendees of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, and the Chinese company also has a permit to test in California, which is where its research labs — including its AI division — is based. Baidu recently lost the head of that project, renowned AI expert Andrew Ng, after he announced the end of his three year stay at the company, but its AI group nevertheless employs around 1,300 people, with 300 of those in the Baidu Research division. That makes it one of the largest units of its kind in tech.