SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s Huawei Technologies is partnering with more legacy automakers to produce Aito-branded electric cars, the company’s senior executive said on Saturday, in a move to expand its presence in the auto industry.

Huawei will team up with Chery Automobile, BAIC Motor and Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group in jointly developing and manufacturing Aito-branded vehicles, Richard Yu, Huawei’s Smart Car CEO, said at the China EV 100 forum in Beijing.

Huawei, which has already a partnership with Seres Group to make Aito cars, plans a series of models including SUVs, sedans and multipurpose vehicles under the Aito brand, Yu added.

“We’d like to fully use the automakers’ resources of production capacity,” Yu said.

Seres sold a total of 80,000 Aito cars featuring Huawei’s HarmonyOS system – developed by the company as an alternative to Android – in 2022, up more than six times from a year ago, according to company filings.

Huawei’s Chairman Eric Xu reiterated at a press conference on Friday that the company doesn’t make cars on its own but only helps other automakers make better vehicles.

Huawei has been hit by a series of export controls by Washington which says it is a security risk, which the company denies. The sanctions have blocked Huawei from buying key components as well as from using Google’s Android operating system. 

The sanctions have also affected Huawei’s partnerships with global automakers, who have given up using Huawei’s vehicle connectivity technologies in the past two years, Yu said on Saturday.

Tension with the U.S. saw Meng detained for three years in Canada over alleged efforts to cover up attempts by Huawei-linked companies to sell equipment to Iran in breach of U.S. sanctions.

(Reporting by Zhang Yan, Zhuzhu Cui and Brenda Goh; Editing by David Holmes)

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – A senior Volkswagen AG China executive reiterated on Saturday the German automaker’s commitment to quickening the pace of electrification in the world’s second largest economy despite issues such as intensified competition and weak demand.

VW plans to increase the number of charging posts for electric vehicles in China to 17,000 by 2025, as it planned to invest 15 billion euros ($16.26 billion) in the country on electric mobility together with its three joint ventures by 2024, Stefan Mecha, chief executive of the Volkswagen brand in China, told China’s EV 100 forum in Beijing.

“The market is flush with new, highly competitive players but strong competition simply motivates us to constantly innovate and improve,” Mecha said.

He added that despite softer short term demand in China, the company is confident that there would be a recovery.

In February, Chinese electrified vehicle maker BYD outsold the Volkswagen-branded cars to be the best-selling passenger car brand in the world’s largest auto market for the second month in four.

Mecha also urged China to extend a purchase tax exemption on new energy vehicles (NEVs), which include both pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars, beyond this year as part of the policy support for the sector.

In September, China extended the tax exemption on such vehicles by a year to the end of 2023.

The government is studying policies to promote auto consumption and eliminate backward automakers as China’s NEV market faces challenges of weak domestic demand, Xin Guobin, vice minister at Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the same forum.

Xin also urged the industry to enhance capabilities in securing supplies of metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel as it also faces threats of global trade protectionism.

($1 = 0.9226 euros)

(Reporting by Zhang Yan, Hongwei Li, Brenda Goh; Editing by William Mallard and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

CERNOBBIO, Italy (Reuters) – The EU’s Economy Commissioner is confident that Italy will get the latest instalment of post-pandemic funds despite questions over the meeting of targets to unlock the money, he said on Saturday.

“I believe that the points that need to be clarified will be clarified, I see great goodwill on the part of the (Italian) government,” Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni told the Ambrosetti business conference in northern Italy.

Gentiloni, himself a former Italian prime minister, said he believed there was room for Italy to renegotiate parts of the plan, noting changes had already been approved for Germany, Finland and Luxembourg.

The European Commission has frozen an overdue 19-billion-euro tranche of post-pandemic funds. Italy has until the end of April to persuade Brussels to release the funds, a government source has told Reuters.

Italy is the single-largest beneficiary of the EU post-COVID Recovery Fund, and meeting the goals agreed with Brussels is one of the main challenges for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightist government that took office in October.

Rome has so far secured almost 67 billion euros of the roughly 200 billion it is due to receive through 2026, dependent on it achieving Brussels’ policy prescriptions.

To gain some flexibility, Italy’s EU Affairs Minister Raffaele Fitto has said the government is in talks with Brussels to replace some projects from its original recovery plan, which it now realises it cannot complete by a 2026 deadline.

These would be replaced with less ambitious programmes that can be completed on time, while the original ones could be financed from separate European Union funds that can be spent until 2029.

(Reporting by Giancarlo Navach and Federico Maccioni, Writing by Keith Weir, Editing by William Maclean and Giles Elgood)

By Sheila Dang

(Reuters) -Twitter on Friday made public parts of the computer code that decides how the social media site recommends content, with its owner Elon Musk adding that the entirety of the code will be available in the next few weeks.

The announcement will allow users and programmers a peek into its workings and the ability to suggest modifications to the algorithm.

“In the coming weeks, we will open source literally everything that contributes to showing a tweet,” Musk said in a tweet on Saturday.

The company said in a blog post it had uploaded the code in two repositories on code-sharing platform Github. They include the source code for many parts of Twitter, including the recommendations algorithm which controls the tweets that users see on their timeline.

The move comes at the behest of Musk, its billionaire owner, who has said code transparency would lead to higher trust among users and rapid improvements to the product.

It also serves to address common concerns among users and lawmakers, who are increasingly scrutinizing social media platforms over how algorithms select the content that users see.

Musk tweeted on Friday that third parties should be able to analyze the open-sourced code and “determine, with reasonable accuracy, what will probably be shown to users.”

“No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered, but we will fix them fast!” he tweeted.

Musk also said Twitter will update its recommendation algorithm based on user suggestions every 24 to 48 hours.

On Friday, Musk and some Twitter employees held a session on Spaces, Twitter’s audio chat feature, asking users to bring recommendations and questions about how the platform’s code works.

One person questioned why Twitter’s code appeared to classify users as Republicans or Democrats. A Twitter employee responded that it was an old feature that was not important to the platform’s recommendation system, and the company was looking to remove it.

The repositories on Github do not include the code that powers Twitter’s ad recommendations, the company said.

It also said it excluded code that would compromise user safety or privacy, as well as details that would undermine efforts to prevent child sexual abuse material on the platform.

The news also comes after parts of Twitter’s source code were leaked on Github, which took down the code last week at Twitter’s request.

Twitter asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to produce “all identifying information” associated with the Github account that had posted the leaked code, according to a legal filing.

(Reporting by Yuvraj Malik and Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru and Sheila Dang in Dallas;Editing by Matthew Lewis and David Holmes)