Hi members!
I hope your weekend was pleasing and restorative. We’ve got a lot going on this week in membership, much of it focused on China. Our field guide this week is on the biggest finance company you may never have heard of, Ant Financial. Spun out of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Ant has grown to be a behemoth in its own right: With a market capitalization of nearly $150 billion, it’s worth almost twice as much as Goldman Sachs. It has gone from a clunky, fax-enabled payment service to a futuristic app, known as Alipay, that can handle more than three times as many transactions per second as Visa. Along with a constellation of affiliates, Ant reaches more than 1 billion users around the world.
We have a team of ace reporters working on Ant Financial this week. Both John Detrixhe and Echo Huang have gone deep to understand how Ant came to be, who are the power players behind it, and how it intends to expand globally, upending the worlds of finance and payments as it grows. We’ll continue that exploration throughout the week, wrapping it up with a members’ video-conference call with John and Echo at 10 a.m. ET/3 p.m. GMT. Please note the one-hour-earlier start time for this week—we’re spanning many time zones for the call, hence the new time this week. To join our call, you can add a reminder to your Google calendar here; otherwise, meet us at this location at the above-mentioned time. For those who would like to call in, dial +1 408 740 7256 in the US or +44 203 608 5256 in the UK; for both numbers, the meeting code is 722 994 440.
That’s not our only China-based story to tell this week. Our video team has a new episode of our ongoing members-only series, Because China. This week, we’re looking at the the short-form video app TikTok (which is the international version of Chinese karaoke and video app Douyin) and how it’s changing the way we find, listen to, and interact with our music.
I hope you enjoy everything we have planned for you. As ever, we want to hear from you—send questions, comments, and suggestions to members@qz.com.
Here’s to a rewarding week,
Sam Grobart
membership editor