Business

China Supermarket 2025: Walmart, Sam's Club, Hema, and Yonghui — Four Paths

The same China supermarket market in 2025 split into four very different trajectories: Walmart's hypermarkets closed 129 stores over five years while restructuring; Sam's Club broke 140 billion RMB in sales and kept opening stores; Hema hit profitability for the first time in a decade with GMV near 100 billion; Yonghui, after being bought out by Miniso founder Ye Guofu for 6.27 billion RMB, is remaking 315 stores under a 'Pang Donglai model' bailout. This post compares scale, financials, business models, operating efficiency, and management styles with public data (annual reports, official disclosures, third-party research).

Book Notes: Freedom of Money

Finished CZ's autobiography Freedom of Money in two days. I don't follow crypto, but his story — going all-in on Bitcoin, becoming the richest Chinese person, and then serving time in a US prison — is genuinely fascinating.

When Hardcore Industry Goes Consumer-Grade

Shenzhen and the Yangtze River Delta have a breed of company that takes industrial-grade hardcore hardware and collapses it into consumer products, turning creation and manufacturing into entertainment. DJI collapsed $100,000+ professional drones to a $3,000 smart flying camera. Bambu Lab turned a $20,000 3D printer into a $2,000 out-of-the-box machine. xTool pushed $10,000 industrial laser cutters down to $1,500. Hypershell compressed the 30kg military exoskeleton into a 2kg / $799 consumer version. Unitree undercut Boston Dynamics' $75,000 Spot to a $1,600 Go2. Xmachine took the $1M+ factory five-axis CNC and put it on your desk for $8,000. Read together they show how consumer-grade downsizing works in today's China — not through policy, but through supply chain density, engineering cost structure, iteration speed, and go-to-market on overseas markets.

Dissecting the Business Models of Content Creation

Content creation might be the biggest lever an ordinary person can pull today — low barrier, high ceiling, zero marginal cost of distribution. Strip it down to its business model, and there are really only three ways to make it work: sell the content itself, sell other people's products, or sell your own.

Reading Notes: The Republic of Technology

Palantir's CEO Alex Karp released a new book in 2025 titled "Tech Republic," which was also published in mainland China by the end of the year. I bought it immediately and read it. The book's viewpoints represent the right-wing ideology of Silicon Valley, and its influence is evident in current American politics.

Data Suppliers Behind Large Models - Surge AI

First learned about Surge AI from Edwin Chen's podcast interview during their initial fundraising. Edwin's extremely pragmatic and efficient views were impressive.

VL Model Behind Doubao AI Phone

According to public reports, the model used by Doubao AI phone is a closed-source version optimized for mobile based on UI-TARS. UI-TARS is derived from SFT on Alibaba's Qwen2 VL, with a 7b version open-sourced (Qwen2 VL has models ranging from 3b to 72b open-sourced). This post will not delve into Qwen (Qwen2 VL already includes UI Operation features), but will focus on further improvements of the UI-TARS model on Qwen2 VL, covering data and training aspects.

Using UTM Tags to Analyze Traffic Sources

When promoting, we typically use multiple channels: cold email, Google ads, Twitter promotion, SEO optimization, community content, etc. Understanding our traffic sources and conversion effectiveness is crucial, as it helps us further optimize our marketing strategy. Today, I'll share a simple way to differentiate traffic and analyze conversion effectiveness:

Cold Start and Growth Strategy for jenni.ai

jenni.ai is a tool for assisting with essay writing and reading, currently generating \$5M ARR with 2.5M users and still growing rapidly. The author expects to reach \$10M~\$20M ARR. Their CEO, David Park, sincerely shared their revenue and user growth strategies, offering many valuable insights.

Benefits Related to Startups

Recently, I plan to take advantage of some deals and have compiled the benefits offered by major international companies, mainly focusing on cloud services and OpenAI tokens.