Google says Asian advertisers spending less due to Europe's customs changes

asia in brief PLUS: Brake pedals break on Huawei-made cars; North Korea named as source of Binance hack; and more! Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published mon // UTC Chap who coded Google’s Pac-Man clone reveals how the game freaked out Firefox now Google's AI satellite sends a very expensive haiku to Earth 1 day ago GM cracks the petty cash box for multistate driver tracking settlement 2 days ago Google's search revenue Ferrari hits an AI-powered speed bump 2 days ago In the year AI re-wrote the infosec rulebook, it’s comforting to know crypto exchanges still have bad security 3 days ago Google has revealed some of its Asian customers – almost certainly Chinese e-tailers – are buying fewer ads. Speaking on Alphabet’s Q3 earnings call last week, chief business officer Philipp Schindler addressed the slowdown in ad sales growth with the following remark: “In retail, some of our APAC advertisers were impacted .” That’s a reference to the European Union’s changes to import duties, which saw the bloc introduce a temporary €3 customs duty for every consignment valued at under €150 imported from outside the EU. The EU previously operated the de minimis exemption that Schindler referred to, meaning it collected no import duty on almost 5.9 billion low-value items shipped to the continent in 2025 alone. The new regime aims to protect European retailers from cheap imports. A great many of those items came from Chinese e-tail giants – the likes of Temu, Shein, and Alibaba – who are thought to account for perhaps ten percent of advertising revenue at Google and Meta. EU policy has therefore contributed to slower growth at Google. Huawei’s brake pedals reportedly break Huawei’s automotive efforts appear to have driven it into a cul de sac of controversy. The Chinese tech giant works with a company called Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Co. (JAC) under the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, which aims to produce intelligent cars. The flagship model produced a luxury EV called the Maextro V800, which when tested a rather terrifying fault: the brake pedal bracket broke when drivers exerted maximum force during tests to assess the car's ability to decelerate suddenly at 100 km/h. The site’s drivers were still able to stop the car, but rather more slowly than is optimal. Within days of the review site posting its findings, reports of its work started to disappear from the internet, according to China Digital Times, a US-based outlet that says it publishes independent news on Chinese affairs.