China also launched an investigation into Alibaba. SAMR started investigating the company’s practice of forcing sellers to sign exclusivity contracts.
Market observers perceived the move as a crackdown on Jack Ma’s ever-growing tech empire.
The People’s Bank of China and three financial watchdogs have conducted a high-level meeting with Ant Group, which owns China’s largest digital payment platform Alipay. Ant Group is a finance affiliate of Alibaba. The regulators also suspended Ant Group’s proposed IPO.
They asked the company to implement tighter financial regulations in its banking services.
Schaefer said all of these things are “foundational and it’s really just kind of setting a framework, a springboard from which China can develop and move forward faster.”
China’s tactics are quite similar to the actions taken by the United States in recent months.
In December, Facebook was hit with two separate antitrust lawsuits filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of the attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam.
