Month: March 2025

If you cannot fight them, join them, is the mantra among Chinese mom-and-pop investors who are embracing DeepSeek and other artificial intelligence tools, in sharp contrast with last year’s government crackdown on computer-driven quantitative traders.

Online crash courses have mushroomed and training rooms are packed with retail traders eager to beat the market using computer models, as the popularity of DeepSeek – itself backed by a quant fund – changed not only the market trajectory, but the perception of China’s $700 billion hedge fund industry.

The rapid adoption of DeepSeek in China’s retail-dominated stock market is also prompting changes at brokerages and wealth managers, while creating new risks for investors in a market dominated and driven by small-time traders’ cash flow.

“The future is the digital age, and AI will be vital,” Hong Yangjun told a packed room of individual investors learning to trade with AI on a weekend in February.

Just as future warfare will be fought with drones and robots, the stock market will be a battleground between computers, the lecturers told the class in an office in downtown Shanghai.

Such piety is in stark contrast to the public outcry a year ago against computer-driven quant funds, viewed as “bloodsuckers” by retail investors, and blamed by regulators for contributing to market unfairness and volatility.

The industry was also the target of a government crackdown roughly a year ago, when the sector was worth $260 billion by some estimates.

Last month, however, investors handed over 15,800 yuan ($2,179.91) each for a weekend lecture by Mao Yuchun, founder of Alpha Squared Capital, on how to trade stocks with AI, according to the organiser, who promoted the event by drawing attention to Alpha Squared’s geographical affinity with High-Flyer.

High-Flyer, based in eastern Hangzhou, is the hedge fund behind DeepSeek – the Chinese AI start up that stunned Silicon Valley with its cost-efficient large language model and spurred a rally in Chinese stocks.

Meanwhile, Chinese social media is brimming with online courses teaching traders how to use DeepSeek to evaluate companies, pick stocks, and code trading strategies.

“Using quantitative tools to pick stocks saves a lot of time,” said Wen Hao, a Hangzhou-based trader.

“You can also use DeepSeek to write codes,” said Wen, who uses computer programs to determine the timing for buying and selling.

US fund giants including BlackRock, Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma have already been using AI in investing for some time. Analysts say small asset managers and even retail investors in China stand to benefit from the emergence of DeepSeek’s open-sourced model.

ChatGPT is off-limits to Chinese users.

The fondness for the AI-led turnaround in the perception of quant trading has coincided with a sunny start to the year for stocks, after a few years in the doldrums.

Goldman Sachs said the MSCI China index has made its best start of the year in history and brokers are racing to build AI models into their platforms.

“In the future, Chinese investors will completely change the way they make investment decisions and place orders,” said Zhou Lefeng, president of Xiangcai Securities.

“Previously, clients would ask wealth managers for investment advice. Now they ask DeepSeek.”

Larry Cao, principal analyst at FinAI Research, said DeepSeek is popular because it’s cost-efficient, has strong reasoning ability, and unlike ChatGPT, is readily available, and is promoted by the Chinese government.

Nevertheless, he is surprised at the level of faith investors put in the model, cautioning that AI has limits.

“People trust AI models more than they trust financial advisers, which is probably misplaced trust at least at this stage,” Cao said.

There could also be a herding effect if one school trains many retail investors to trade using the same signal.

“Large language models seem impressive. But at this stage, they are not necessarily smarter than most investors.”

What’s certain, said Feng Ji, CEO of Baiont Quant, is that DeepSeek has changed retail perception of quant fund managers.

“I can feel strongly that the public are thinking twice about quant fund managers’ contributions to society,” said Feng, whose company uses machine learning to trade.

“I never think we caused retail investors’ losses. We actually provide liquidity and make the market more efficient.” Reuters

Canada’s Mitel Networks has filed for bankruptcy in the US as the telecommunications firm continued to struggle after carrying out debt maneuvers about two years ago.

The firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District Court of Texas, court documents show. It listed assets and liabilities of $1 billion to $10 billion each in its petition.

The company provides communication services including business phones and call centers and competes with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc. and Avaya Inc. It had 75 million users in 2023.

Mitel was acquired by private equity Searchlight Capital Partners in an all-cash offer at $2 billion in 2018, a move that the company said would facilitate its strategy to further develop cloud services.

Back in November 2022, the company carried out a so-called “up-tiering” transaction that pushed some lenders back in the repayment line. While the deal injected fresh liquidity into the company, analysts noted that Mitel still faced uncertain business fundamentals. Bloomberg

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel Ltd on Tuesday (March 11) announced the transfer of its 69.94% shareholding in Airtel Payments Bank to its wholly owned subsidiary, Airtel Ltd, following the receipt of requisite regulatory and corporate approvals.

“This is to inform you that the shareholding of 69.94%, held by Bharti Airtel Limited (the Company) in Airtel Payments Bank Limited (Bank), is being transferred to the company’s wholly owned subsidiary (i.e. Airtel Limited), post receiving requisite regulatory and corporate approvals. The above is an internal reorganization of shareholding in the bank and has no impact on the ownership of the bank,” Bharti Airtel said in a regulatory filing.

The move is part of an internal reorganisation and does not impact the ownership structure of the bank. The share transfer agreement was executed on March 11, 2025, with completion expected as per the mutual agreement between the parties. The transaction, classified as a related party transaction, will be conducted on an arm’s length basis.

Bharti Airtel reported a net profit of ₹14,781 crore for the third quarter that ended on December 31, 2024. However, on an adjusted basis (before the exceptional items), the profit after tax (PAT) growth was 121% year-on-year at ₹5,514 crore.

In the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal year, Bharti Airtel posted a net profit of ₹2,442 crore. The company’s revenue from operations increased 19% to ₹45,129 crore against ₹37,900 crore YoY, driven by strong momentum in India and continued underlying growth in constant currency in Africa.

EBITDA rose by 24.1% year-on-year to ₹24,880 crore, with an EBITDA margin of 55.1%. The company’s EBITDAaL (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation, and adjusted loss) also saw a significant boost, up 26.1% YoY to ₹21,474 crore, achieving an EBITDAaL margin of 47.6%.

EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) grew by 33.3% YoY to ₹13,126 crore, with an EBIT margin of 29.1%. Net income before exceptional items stood at ₹5,514 crore, and capex for the quarter was ₹9,161 crore.

Shares of Bharti Airtel Ltd ended at ₹1,661.20, up by ₹31.50, or 1.93%, on the BSE. CNBCTV18

Mukesh Ambani can’t afford to have Donald Trump smash open the latch with a sledgehammer. But that is how the threat is unfolding.

The concern in New Delhi is that any retaliatory trade action by Washington will cover broader ground than just India’s “massive tariffs,” as the US president characterized them Friday. American firms do “very little business inside” the most-populous nation, Trump said.

Indian conglomerates enjoy varying degrees of protection from foreign competition. While nearly all of them are at risk from concessions to avoid a trade war, Ambani’s empire appears to be unusually vulnerable.

Retail and digital services, which have guzzled $50 billion in investments since 2020, are key to the group’s $200 billion market value. Both units, currently a part of the flagship Reliance Industries Ltd., are nearing their much-awaited public floats, though they aren’t exactly ready. The sprawling retail business, as Bloomberg News reported last week, is undergoing an overhaul amid sagging analyst estimates of its worth.

At this critical juncture, Elon Musk entering the market with Starlink Inc., or Washington dictating tweaks to domestic policies that have kept Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. at a disadvantage on Ambani’s home turf, could be destabilizing.

Ambani’s Jio Platforms Ltd., which has nearly 500 million subscribers, has joined India’s other major terrestrial wireless carriers in opposing Starlink. Musk’s satellite broadband service will probably get an entry pass without having to bid for telecom spectrum in government auctions. Losing high-paying customers to a new player with lower regulatory costs could put a lid on pricing.

Jio’s average revenue per user has grown 12% over the past year. But for a splashy public listing, it isn’t enough to earn just $2-plus every month. Using the telco as a core offering, Ambani has put together a media juggernaut. JioHotstar, his online streaming app, is offering data customers Hollywood movies, HBO shows and the annual Indian Premier League — a compelling offer in a cricket-crazy nation — for a little more than $1. It is a costly route to acquiring eyeballs, and the last thing Ambani would want is a breach into his moat.

Apart from carriage and content, the billionaire also needs to worry about commerce. Before the inauguration, Trump met Doug McMillon, the Walmart chief executive officer, at his Mar-a-Lago estate. That meeting didn’t go unnoticed in New Delhi, whose restrictive policies have been a bane for Walmart’s Flipkart and Amazon’s local marketplace — and a boon for Reliance Retail. Despite those obstacles, McMillon is getting ready for an initial public offering of Flipkart next year.

The American-owned platforms are hamstrung by foreign-investment regulations that don’t allow them to carry their own inventory or offer deep discounts. Those restrictions, ostensibly put in place to protect millions of mom-and-pop shops, don’t apply to homegrown players like Reliance. In addition to more than 19,000 stores, the country’s largest retailer also has its own beauty and clothes apps, and JioMart, an online grocery service. Any promise extracted by Trump’s negotiators on altering the regulatory landscape could erode Ambani’s advantage.

Reliance’s consumer pivot is backed by its legacy cash cow: oil-to-chemicals. Geopolitics, a key driver of that business, is something Ambani managed deftly during the first Trump administration, when he lobbied to keep Venezuelan crude flowing to his refinery despite US sanctions. Still, Trump 2.0 may be different. It’s unclear how much more profit Reliance can extract from Russian oil, which has gone from being a negligible part of India’s import to nearly a third since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Here, too, Trump may wade in. The south Asian nation will be purchasing “a lot of our oil and gas,” the US president said after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month. But a barrel of American oil costs $7 to $8 more than the Russian variety. “The increased intake of US crudes will likely impact refining margins” for Indian firms, according to Kotak Institutional Equities. With Chinese supplies flooding global petrochemicals markets, the sub-9% profitability1 at Ambani’s unit may struggle to rise to last year’s 11% level.

Three large franchises, and three separate headaches emanating from the same source in Washington. And to top the list, control of the family’s crown jewel, Reliance Industries, is passing to Ambani’s three children as part of a planned succession.

The youngest, Anant Ambani, heir apparent of the energy business, made headlines globally for his $600 million, five-month-long wedding celebration last year. More recently, he was in the news for hosting Modi at his animal sanctuary. What investors would want from the younger Ambani is an update on the $9 billion earmarked for solar modules, hydrogen electrolyzers, and energy storage batteries. For one thing, the investment outlook for clean energy has soured globally. For another, the battery factory has missed a performance milestone, and the government has claimed damages because the unit enjoys a taxpayer-funded incentive.

Considering that the group once silenced naysayers by completing the first phase of the world’s largest refinery complex in a record 33 months, even a small delay in execution a quarter-century later isn’t a good look. Despite all the disappointments, analysts’ consensus opinion is for the Reliance stock to gain 24% over the next 12 months. For that, Ambani will need to regain control of a narrative that’s slipping away from him. Bloomberg