The United Arab Emirates promises to invest $1.4 trillion in the United States; Trump announces a 25% tariff on all imported cars; BMW reaches a coop

The global industry is reshaping its landscape amidst competition and collaboration. BMW and Alibaba have joined hands to develop an AI engine for intelligent cockpits, and Tesla showcased its humanoid robot Optimus for the first time in Saudi Arabia. Multinational corporations are breaking through geopolitical barriers through technology grafting. The Trump administration has announced a 25% tariff on imported cars, forcibly severing the industrial chain through trade protectionism. The UAE has promised to invest $1.4 trillion in the US to embed itself in strategic sectors such as semiconductors through capital leverage, all aiming at the competition for control of the technology ecosystem.

Notably, embodied intelligence is becoming a key variable in reshaping the future productivity landscape. This field has shifted from the early stage of "wild growth" with single-point breakthroughs to a new stage of "ecosystem co-construction".

Let's read this week's overseas expansion news to learn about the latest trends.

The UAE promises to invest $1.4 trillion in the US over 10 years

The White House said that the UAE will invest $1.4 trillion in the US over 10 years. Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump met with UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. "This new framework will significantly increase the UAE's existing investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and US manufacturing in the US economy," the White House said in a statement on Friday announcing the agreement. (Sina Caixin)

The Ministry of Commerce: It will organize a survey of the domestic sales needs of foreign trade enterprises and establish a list of key foreign trade high-quality product enterprises

On March 25, Li Weizheng, the deputy director of the Market System Construction Department of the Ministry of Commerce, said in response to a reporter's question that creating consumer demand through high-quality foreign trade products is one of the important aspects of expanding domestic consumption. This year, the Ministry of Commerce will continue to lead with the "China Tour of High-quality Foreign Trade Products" activity to expand the consumption of foreign trade high-quality products. Li Weizheng introduced that there are mainly four key tasks to support stable foreign trade and expand consumption: First, smooth the domestic sales channels of foreign trade high-quality products and build platforms for foreign trade enterprises to expand domestic sales. Second, increase support for the consumption of foreign trade high-quality products. Third, cultivate brands for the consumption of foreign trade high-quality products, survey the domestic sales needs of foreign trade enterprises, and establish a list of key foreign trade high-quality product enterprises. Fourth, promote the connection of domestic and international standards certification. (Securities Times)

US President Trump announces a 25% tariff on all imported cars

On March 26 local time, US President Trump signed an executive order at the White House, announcing a 25% tariff on all imported cars. The relevant measures will take effect on April 2. Trump said that the car tariff will be permanent. He said that if cars are manufactured in the US, no tariff will be paid. Trump also said that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has not made any suggestions on the car tariff and has not asked for any benefits from it. Trump also said that day that the US will impose tariffs on timber and drugs. (CCTV News)

BMW reaches a cooperation with Alibaba

BMW Group announced a deepened strategic cooperation with Alibaba Group. Based on Alibaba's Tongyi AI large model, they will jointly develop an AI engine, which will be applied to BMW's new generation of models in the Chinese market. This deepened strategic cooperation mainly focuses on cutting-edge technology fields such as AI large models and intelligent voice interaction. Based on the Tongyi large model and Zebra Yuan Shen AI, the new BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant will use the AI engine jointly developed by BMW and Alibaba and is planned to be installed in BMW's new generation of models produced in China, with an expected delivery in the Chinese market in 2026. The intelligent cockpit and intelligent travel interaction scenarios supported by the AI engine will make their debut at the Shanghai Auto Show in April this year. (36Kr)

Thailand's car production in February decreased by 13.62% year-on-year, shrinking for the 19th consecutive month

The Federation of Thai Industries said on Tuesday that due to weak domestic sales and exports, Thailand's car production in February decreased by 13.62% year-on-year to 115,487 vehicles. This is the 19th consecutive month of decline in Thailand's car production after a 24.63% year-on-year decrease in January. Thailand is the largest car production center in Southeast Asia and an export base for some of the world's top car manufacturers such as Toyota. (Sina Finance)

South Korea's retail sales in February increased by 4.4% year-on-year, and online retail sales soared by 16.7%

Data released on Tuesday showed that due to strong demand for e-commerce services, South Korea's retail sales in February increased by more than 4% year-on-year. According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy of South Korea, last month, South Korea's retail sales increased by 4.4% compared with the same period last year. This increase is mainly attributed to strong demand for online shopping and food delivery services. The sales in the online sector increased by 16.7% year-on-year, with food sales increasing by 14.9% and sales of online services (such as food delivery and e-coupons) increasing by 76.3%. (Sina Finance)

A large number of advertisers who abandoned X are returning to the platform

In November 2023, IBM suspended its advertising on the former X (formerly Twitter), and companies such as Apple, Walt Disney, Comcast, and Warner Bros. also suspended their advertising on the platform.

Since then, Musk has become a senior advisor to President Trump and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Now, X is expected to see its first year of advertising growth since Musk took office in 2022. According to eMarketer, X is expected to generate $1.31 billion in advertising sales in the US, a year-on-year increase of 17.5%. The situation globally is similar, with sales expected to increase by 16.5% to $2.26 billion.

Jasmine Enberg, the chief analyst at Emarketer, told Bloomberg that part of the increase in advertising spending is driven by the fear of manufacturers as large advertisers return to the advertising market to please the Trump administration. (Tencent News)

Temasek's $54 billion asset management subsidiary to open an office in Abu Dhabi

Temasek Holdings' $54 billion asset management holding company will open an office in Abu Dhabi, joining a series of financial institutions that have recently flocked to the oil-producing emirate. Seviora will locate its office in the local financial center ADGM. "Opening this new office will help the company expand in Asia and other regions," Seviora said in a statement on Monday. A few months ago, Mubadala Capital, a subsidiary of the $330 billion Abu Dhabi wealth fund, signed a cooperation memorandum of understanding with Seviora regarding co-investment and other opportunities. (Sina Finance)

Hyundai Motor Group announces a $21 billion investment plan in the US, covering areas such as car production, steel, and energy

Hyundai Motor Group announced on March 25 that it will invest $21 billion in the US by 2028. Specifically, the investment in the car production field will be $8.6 billion, the investment in parts, logistics, and steel fields will be $6.1 billion, and the investment in future industries and energy fields will be $6.3 billion. The annual production capacity of Hyundai Motor's dedicated electric vehicle factory HMGMA in Georgia, the US, will increase by 200,000 vehicles, and the total annual production capacity target of its US factories will reach 1.2 million vehicles. The group will also build an electric arc furnace steel plant in Louisiana, the US, to specifically produce low-carbon car steel plates. (Jiemian News)

Alibaba open-sources its first full-modal large model Qwen2.5-Omni, achieving the world's strongest performance with a 7B size

Early on March 27, Alibaba released and open-sourced its first end-to-end full-modal large model Tongyi Qianwen Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, which can simultaneously process multiple inputs such as text, images, audio, and video, and generate text and natural speech synthesis output in real-time. In authoritative evaluations such as the multi-modal fusion task OmniBench, Qwen2.5-Omni has refreshed the industry record, far exceeding similar models such as Google's Gemini-1.5-Pro in all dimensions. Qwen2.5-Omni perceives the world in a "three-dimensional" way similar to human multi-sensory perception and interacts with it in real-time. It can also recognize emotions through audio and video and make more intelligent and natural feedback and decisions in complex tasks. (36Kr)

Tesla announces its entry into the Saudi market

Tesla announced that it will hold a product launch event in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on April 10 to officially enter the largest car market in the Gulf region. According to the official website announcement, the event will showcase its full range of electric vehicles and solar products, and debut the self-driving taxi Cybercab and the humanoid robot "Optimus", but the specific launch time has not been disclosed. (Sina Finance)

Google releases a new generation of inference model to counter OpenAI, capable of processing one million tokens at a time

Early on March 26, Google officially launched its new generation of artificial intelligence inference model Gemini 2.5, which is based on the upgrade of the multi-modal large language framework, significantly enhancing its inference ability, multi-language support, and long-text processing ability. Gemini 2.5 Pro supports multi-modal input of text, images, audio, video, and code, with a context window of one million tokens (about 750,000 words), and can parse the complete text of the "Lord of the Rings" series. It will be upgraded to two million tokens in the future. The Gemini 2.5 series of models is Google's most significant attempt to challenge OpenAI's "o" series of models. Its flagship version, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, has outperformed competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic in multiple benchmark tests. (Jiemian News)

OpenAI is close to finalizing a $40 billion financing led by SoftBank

It is reported that OpenAI is close to finalizing a $40 billion financing led by SoftBank. The investors include Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders Fund, and Altimeter Capital Management. This deal will value the company at $300 billion. (36Kr)

WeRide obtains a driverless license in France

WeRide announced that it has joined hands with French autonomous driving mobility network operator beti to obtain a license for pure driverless public road testing and operation in France. So far, WeRide has become the world's first and so far the only technology company to hold autonomous driving licenses in five countries: China, the UAE, Singapore, France, and the US. This license allows WeRide's autonomous minibuses to operate at a speed of 40 km/h, which is the highest-speed pure driverless road testing and operation license approved in France at present. (36Kr)

He Xiaopeng: The trend of "competing in intelligence" in the Chinese car industry is a natural process

In response to the trend of "competing in intelligence" in the Chinese car industry, He Xiaopeng, the chairman and CEO of XPeng Motors, said that this is a natural process. In the past, software-defined cars and car intelligence may have only accounted for 5% of the purchase decision factors, but in the future, it may account for half. "This transformation process has just begun. I think in the future, you will see the R & D logic and changes of all car companies. It is impossible not to conduct self-research." He Xiaopeng believes that in the trend of intelligence, self-research by companies has become a necessity. (The Paper)

AI Agents may reshape the Internet ecosystem by taking over mobile phones

A research report by CICC said that after ChatGPT led the start of this round of AI products, the product form of the next generation of AI has also attracted wide attention. Recently, the startup company Monica launched the general-purpose AI Agent Manus, which has sparked discussions about AI Agents, the L3 stage products of AI. Manus has made innovations in the multi-agent mode and reliability issues. CICC believes that the innovation of product forms such as AI Agents is as important as the evolution of the underlying models and shows strong potential for commercialization and implementation. Looking forward, AI Agents may reshape the Internet ecosystem by taking over mobile phones. (36Kr)

It is recommended to pay attention to the development of high-level AI applications such as humanoid robots and autonomous driving in the Robotic AI era

A research report by CICC believes that humanoid robots are benefiting from the evolution of AI large models in language, vision, and other aspects, helping to improve the generalization ability of robots and upgrade the interaction experience. It is optimistic about the broad growth space driven by technological innovation and the transformation of data processing methods in the field of humanoid robots. The autonomous driving industry is evolving from end-to-end to VLA technology combined with VLM (Vision - Language Models). It is expected that VLA mass production in cars will be seen in 2025, and VLA is expected to accelerate the commercialization process of high-level intelligent driving. It is recommended to pay attention to the development of high-level AI applications such as humanoid robots and autonomous driving in the Robotic AI era and related industrial chain targets. (36Kr)

Embodied intelligence is moving from "wild growth" to "ecosystem co-construction"

In 2025, embodied intelligence was written into the "Government Work Report" for the first time. In the industry's view, embodied intelligence has become an important direction for China to cultivate future industries and a "key area" in global technological competition and cooperation. However, in this emerging field, although the number of enterprises has increased significantly and investment has become increasingly active, the proportion of breakthrough patents in basic core technologies still needs to be improved overall. At present, embodied intelligence is moving from single-point breakthroughs to industrial collaboration, from "wild growth" to "ecosystem co-construction", opening a new stage of ecological development. As the industry moves from scale expansion to quality improvement, how to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and achieve efficient integration of resources and innovation breakthroughs has become an urgent problem to be solved. (Securities Daily)

Accelerating overseas expansion: The sales of smart home appliances related products from Suzhou on AliExpress increased by 400% year-on-year

The overseas expansion of smart home appliances is accelerating. Data from AliExpress' anniversary promotion in March shows that the sales of cleaning smart home appliances increased by 400% compared with the same period last year, with most of them coming from the home appliance industrial belt in Suzhou. The main product of the Suzhou brand JONR is an all-round base station sweeping robot equipped with an AI computing cleaning algorithm that can automatically adjust the cleaning route and intensity. Before the event, JONR prepared 12,000 sweeping robots for AliExpress in advance, and all of them were sold out in less than a week. Driven by the event and the "10 billion subsidy", the sales in one week exceeded the total sales on the platform last year. (36Kr)

The CIHC2025 International Hydrogen Energy Conference is about to open

From March 26 to 27, the 2025 International Hydrogen Energy Conference and International Hydrogen Energy and Fuel Cell Industry Exhibition (referred to as the "CIHC2025 International Hydrogen Energy Conference"), jointly hosted by the China Hydrogen Energy Alliance and the China Electricity Council, will be held at the National Convention Center in Beijing. At this exhibition, the "National Energy Hydrogen Energy Technology Open Day" exhibition area of the National Energy Group will focus on showcasing the group's exploration and practice in the hydrogen energy industry in the past decade, and the achievements of the "green hydrogen energy industrial chain" and "hydrogen energy innovation service chain" built in fields such as technological innovation, industrial layout, and industry ecosystem. The exhibits include the National Energy Hydrogen Energy sand table, 5 models of hydrogen energy "first sets", intelligent hydrogen refueling robots, and the PEM electrolyzer test platform. (People's Financial News)

China and ASEAN hold a special joint committee meeting for the China - ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0

According to the news on the official website of the Ministry of Commerce, on March 24, the special joint committee meeting for the China - ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 was held via video. Officials from the competent departments of China, the ten ASEAN countries, and the ASEAN Secretariat attended the meeting. The two sides actively promoted the resolution of the remaining issues of the upgrade protocol for the China - ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 and agreed to complete the legal review of the text as soon as possible to prepare for the signing of the protocol. The upgrade of the China - ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 will comprehensively expand the mutually beneficial cooperation between the two sides in emerging fields and create an inclusive, modern, comprehensive, and reciprocal free trade agreement. (Daily Economic News)

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hangzhou Qiantang Enterprise Overseas Expansion Service Base". The author is Qiantang Overseas Expansion. It is published with authorization from Qiantang.