China’s domestic robot makers have expanded their market share to 31% in 2015, while in 2013 it was only about 25%, according to a report by the International Federation of Robotics. Sales of industrial robots grew 17% year-on-year in 2015 in China, with 68,000 industrial robots sold. Due to the economic slowdown and China’s reforms in the manufacturing sector, the growth rate slackened last year. Robot sales in 2014 were up 56% on the previous year. Nonetheless, China surpassed the total market volume for Europe, whose total sales for industrial robots in 2015 was 50,000 units.

China’s Tencent has agreed to buy Finnish game-maker Supercell, creator of “Clash of Clans,” from Japanese mobile firm SoftBank for USD8.6 billion. Tencent said Supercell management would retain operational independence and the firm would still be based in Finland. SoftBank had bought a 51% stake in Supercell for some USD1.53 billion in 2013 before increasing its stake to about 73% in 2015. A joint statement by the three companies said it was SoftBank’s “privilege to be part of Supercell’s incredible growth story.” Supercell Chief Executive Officer Ilkka Paananen said the company has created four top games in the past six years which are now being played by over 100 million people every day. “This new partnership offers us exciting growth opportunities in China, where we will be able to reach hundreds of millions of new gamers,” he said. Tencent in May reported a 33% surge in net profit for the first quarter of 2016, beating analyst estimates, the Shanghai Daily reports.

China’s consumer sentiment will weaken slightly this year, but wealthy households and young people will be a strong source of spending. Three-quarters of consumers said they would maintain or increase their spending compared to last year’s levels, down from 81% in 2015, according to the Boston Consulting Group in its survey of 3,500 people. “Even as sentiment moderates a bit, it is important to note that we are looking at a slowdown in consumption growth,” said partner Jeff Walters. “Consumption in 2016 will be tantamount to consumers’ moving from the fast lane to the middle lane on the economic highway. They are not pulling into the breakdown lane.” More than 40% of urban households have monthly incomes exceeding CNY8,000, which puts them in China’s middle class. Household income growth declined to 8.7% in the first quarter, down from 9.4% a year earlier, amid the slowdown in the industrial sector, which employs the bulk of middle class workers. The number of families with a disposable monthly income of more than CNY12,000 is expected to double to about 100 million and account for 30% of the urban population by 2020. Their spending is expected to grow 17% this year. Most affluent consumers are employed in the high-end services sector, the South China Morning Post reports.

A Chinese supercomputer has topped a list of the world’s fastest computers for the seventh straight year – and for the first time the winner uses Chinese-designed processors instead of U.S. technology. The Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, was developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology using Chinese-designed processors. The TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second, according to TOP500. Its top speed is about five times that of No 3-ranked Oak Ridge’s Titan, which uses Cray, NVIDIA and Opteron technology. The TaihuLight uses Chinese-developed Shenwei processors, “ending any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing,” TOP500 said in a statement.The second-fastest computer, the Tianhe-2 at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, is capable of 33 petaflops, using chips made by Intel Corp.

China also displaced the U.S. as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. It had 167 systems, compared with 165 from the U.S. Japan was No 3 with 29 systems. Supercomputers are used for specialized purposes that include weather forecasting, nuclear weapons design, and analyzing oilfields. “Considering that just 10 years ago, China claimed a mere 28 systems on the list, with none ranked in the top 30, the nation has advanced further and faster than any other country in the history of supercomputing,” the TOP500 organizers said in a statement. Jack Dongarra, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee and editor of the list, told Xinhua News Agency: “It’s a trend with China. They had no systems in 2001, and today they surpass the United States. No other nation has seen such rapid growth.”

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is considering allowing foreign companies to issue shares on the mainland as part of its drive to reform the convertibility of the yuan and open up China’s capital market. Beijing will press ahead with reforms to allow individuals to invest in overseas capital markets directly, according to the central bank’s 2015 annual report. Beijing hopes introducing foreign companies to China’s capital market will give more options to choice-starved investors and shore up the corporate governance of domestic listed firms. Without specifying a time frame, the central bank said “in future” it would allow qualified foreign companies to issue shares on the mainland, including Chinese depositary receipts (CDRs). These are certificates issued by Chinese banks that represent a pool of foreign equity traded on Chinese exchanges. CDRs are similar to American depositary receipts (ADRs), which have been widely used by Chinese companies to issue shares in the U.S. market. China would launch the qualified domestic individual investor scheme, known as QDII2, at a “proper time” to facilitate financial investment by individuals in overseas markets, the central bank said in highlighting its key tasks in making the yuan fully convertible under the capital account, the South China Morning Post reports.