EVs taking on AI OS and the Delivery War. The Chinese Tech Winners Beyond BAT with Alan Zhang

In this episode, I sit down with Alan Zhang (Principal & Portfolio Manager at Ox Capital Management) to map China’s tech landscape through an investor’s lens. We break down how Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are approaching AI, and why the “AI OS” is the real endgame. Finally, we analyze what’s changing in China’s consumer internet, EV ecosystem, and embodied AI pipeline. We also unpack China’s delivery wars (Alibaba vs Meituan vs JD), why quick commerce is structurally different from traditional e-commerce, and how markets price geopolitical risk into China tech valuations.

Alan Zhang is a Principal and Portfolio Manager at Ox Capital Management, a boutique investment firm focused on emerging market equities that he co-founded in 2021. At OxCap, Alan leads investments across Asia; previously, he spent years as an investment analyst on the Asia team at Platinum Asset Management.

He studied Actuarial Science and Commerce at the University of New South Wales, and he’s even taught advanced econometrics. So if you like the intersection of fundamentals, market structure, and Asia platform businesses, well then, this one’s for you.

In today’s world, there’s no shortage of information. Knowledge is abundant, perspectives are everywhere. But true insight doesn’t come from access alone—it comes from differentiated understanding. It’s the ability to piece together scattered signals, cut through the noise and clutter, and form a clear, original perspective on a situation, a trend, a business, or a person. That’s what makes understanding powerful.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend—someone who can help us see things differently.

For more information on the podcast series, see here.

Chapters

01:34 Alan’s background: quant → Asia equities

03:11 US vs China AI: frontier vs “two-legged” approach

05:25 “Uninvestable” China and what changed

07:31 Beyond BAT: Xiaomi, Meituan, Mindray, MicroPort

09:24 BAT AI strategies and the AI OS thesis

13:45 Tencent: tools, data, distribution, and model strategy

16:33 AI-native phones: ByteDance × ZTE and what’s next

26:51 China EV landscape: BYD, Huawei, Xiaomi, Zeekr

31:28 Why phone OEMs can compete in EVs

34:16 Embodied AI: robotics parts, redundancy, and Unitree

39:38 Valuation + geopolitics: why Asia tech trades discounted

41:53 China delivery wars: subsidies, quick commerce, Meituan’s edge

50:27 12–18 month predictions + what investors miss (healthcare)

AI-Generated Transcript

Grace Shao (00:00)In today’s world, there’s no shortage of information. Knowledge is abundant. Perspectives are everywhere. But true insight doesn’t come from access alone. It comes from differentiated understanding — the ability to piece together scattered signals, cut through the noise and clutter, and form a clear, original perspective on a situation, a trend, a business, or a person. That’s what makes understanding powerful.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend — someone who can help us see things differently.

So today, joining me is Alan Zhang. And I’m Grace Shao. Alan, really excited to have you. I’m excited about today’s conversation because we’re going to get into the investor’s perspective on Asia tech and emerging markets — with a proper markets-and-math backbone.

Alan Zhang is Principal and Portfolio Manager at Ox Capital Management, a boutique investment firm focused on emerging market equities that he co-founded in 2021. At OxCap, Alan leads investments across Asia. Before that, he spent years as an investment analyst on the Asia team at Platinum Asset Management. He studied actuarial science and commerce at the University of New South Wales, and he’s even taught advanced econometrics.

So if you like the intersection of fundamentals, market structure, and Asia platform businesses, this episode is for you. Alan, welcome.

Alan Zhang (01:31)Thank you, Grace. Pleasure to be here.

Grace Shao (01:34)Alan, to start, why don’t you tell us about yourself — your background — and what it is that you cover now?

Alan Zhang (01:40)I grew up partly in Hong Kong, mainland China — Shenzhen particularly — and in Australia. I spent close to a decade in Australia doing my schooling and education, and worked for a firm called Platinum Asset Management, then co-founded Ox Capital with Joseph Lai.

I studied actuarial science, so I’ve had a lot of experience manipulating numbers, cleaning up data — and that helped me tremendously in public equities. Nowadays there’s no shortage of financial data, and the ability to understand them — and the intent behind them — is crucial to investing.

Grace Shao (02:34)Yeah, yeah.

Alan Zhang (02:46)At Ox Capital, we also built a tool called the Mode Model, which distills more than a million financial data points from various sources to help us understand our coverage region a lot more. In terms of my coverage, I build quant models, I look at equities, and I also help with portfolio positioning based on macroeconomics in Asia.

Grace Shao (03:11)That’s interesting because you started off in quant, but now you’re looking at equities — the fundamentals, right? You’re covering a lot of ADRs, and a lot of China’s big tech.

Let’s talk about that. What is the China big tech internet ecosystem looking like right now? How does it compare to the US?

Alan Zhang (03:20)In the US, they are focusing more on frontier models, while Chinese companies are taking more of a two-legged approach — tackling AI with different approaches. The US has invested a lot of resources into advancing frontier models. On one hand, we see successful cases like Gemini, Anthropic, and OpenAI, while we also see a lot of AI subscriptions cutting their prices by more than 90% in the last few years.

If you remember in 2023 and 2024, many subscriptions were priced at a few hundred — some over $1,000 a month — based on investment assumptions. Now they’re cutting prices to sub-$100 a month. Some may never make their money back based on those assumptions, but it’s not being discussed today because the benefit of AI far outweighs that blip, and large-cap companies are investing enough to offset the impact.

If we look at China, they haven’t gone through this episode — and I don’t think they will. Anyone who looks at Asia understands Asian users will never assume people will pay over $1,000 a month for subscriptions. China is working on frontier models, applications, and infrastructure at the same time.

In summary, China is still the runner-up, but they’re developing AI in a more balanced manner. And it’s also good to see the US pivoting — in the recent 12 months, we’re seeing more US companies investing in software and applications rather than just frontier models.

Grace Shao (05:25)China was deemed uninvestable, especially for Western investors. Your fund is based in Australia and Hong Kong, and your LPs are non-Chinese. For public investors who want exposure to China’s AI upside — what are they looking at? What are they thinking?

Alan Zhang (05:46)Usually the big tech. China went through the property adjustment and the antitrust campaign in the internet space. It was painful — people called it uninvestable because they couldn’t see new growth drivers. And if they could, they were too insignificant compared to the two most important industries at the time: internet tech and property, which were both recalibrating.

But things are different now because investors can see new growth drivers scaling up. In hindsight, these adjustments also helped innovation: talent that dreamed of landing a job at Meituan, Tencent, Alibaba went to smaller firms or startups; capital that made easy money in real estate went to new areas.

Economic transformation is still a work in progress, and investing in China becomes more attractive if we see AI, consumption, and advanced manufacturing play a bigger role. We’re still in that phase. But we’re glad to see some companies bottoming ou…

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